Project Management: Website Redesign
The Story
The University of Alabama in Huntsville’s (UAH) Office of Housing and Residence Life needed a new website. Their old site was disorganized and cluttered and offered prospective students little sense of what life in their dormitories was like other than some fuzzy, low-res floorplan drawings and random photo galleries.
At a national higher-ed convention in 2021, UAH’s director and assistant director of housing were approached by a third-party content developer who pitched their product: interactive 360-degree tours of featured rooms with detailed information about the rooms’ dimensions and amenities. This is a standard feature of the residence life sections of the websites of many competitive colleges and universities. UAH was woefully behind. Impressed by what they saw, but unable to justify the expense with their limited budget, the assistant director approached our office for help.
The Happy Ending
I was given leadership of the project from conception to production. Proposing a timeline of 10-12 months, I led the Housing team through the full design process–brainstorming, wireframing, prototyping, content creation, construction, publication, and planning for ongoing maintenance of a new website.
Working in close collaboration with our team’s web developer, we purchased a Theta 360-degree camera, captured footage of 14 room types, drew high-resolution graphic floor plans for each room type, and designed and built an interactive, modal interface that would give users an immersive, detailed, fully controllable experience of each of UAH’s dorm room types without ever having to visit campus.
To make their browsing experience easy, the developer and I used the Bootstrap card system clone and dynamic search filter that we had created to solve another design problem months earlier. This allowed users the ability to shop for housing based on their needs and their budgets. You can visit the redesigned site here:
The Housing office’s new site launched in 2022. The impact was immediately apparent; Our clients in Housing reported users and university staff alike expressing delight with the new content and its ease of use. Furthermore, our team saved the university over $50,000 in content development and maintenance costs. Click on any of the featured thumbnails below to see a full-length screenshot of the page or element.
Housing Homepage
Before
After
Dormitory Search
Before
After
Dormitory Profile
Before
After
Floorplan
Before
After
