Duquesne School of Nursing Online

Responsibilities: user experience, site architecture, page design, pattern library and documentation

When Duquesne University released new brand guidelines, I was tasked with redesigning their assets for the Online Nursing domain operated by Pearson Online Learning Services. In addition to creating the new homepage, I audited and restructured the site’s architecture, created a new site header & navigation menu, and I developed a Figma pattern library and documentation.

Check out this demo made to demonstrate to our executive team the potential time savings this could create — a designer using the Duq library and auto-layout could create a mockup in under 5 minutes (including file set-up)! Implementing this library was predicted to reduce designer time on program launches by about 75%.

Figma Pattern Library

To support our Design team, I created a pattern library and documentation in Figma of components designers could easily mix and match to create a plethora of different mockups for the new Duquesne brand for the future. Explore the embed below, or this prototype link.

Auditing UX and Site Architecture

Stakeholders on this project included our SEO and Conversion teams, the development and copywriting teams team, and of course the client themselves. Included here are screenshots of the site as it was before we began (right click each to open the images in a new window to get a closer look).

In tandem with our stakeholders, and after reviewing performance data, we determined that the problem with the existing page was largely organizational and aesthetic: it simply looked out-dated, and wasn’t serving users the information they needed in an intuitive manner.

The previous iteration used the same hamburger navigation for desktop and mobile experiences.

Onlinenursing.duq.edu as it existed before my redesign.

Updated Site Map

Before any other work could begin, my first task was figuring out a new architecture for the site. I started by doing a full audit of the site, identifying the different pages we had, and then I came up with a solution to organize and serve these pages in an intuitive manner. I worked with SEO, CRO, content and business teams to identify what content we could repurpose, what we should add, and how best to roll all these change out.

Site Navigation

When it came to serving users information early, we choose to step away from the hamburger and move to a flat navigation, to let users quickly scan and find the section they wanted and navigate accordingly. From a UX perspective, one of our biggest challenges of this transition was the simple depth of navigation SEO wanted to include, which meant coming up with a desktop menu that balanced their needs with the user’s. We chose to create an organized mega-menu, to let users quickly scan and access the content they wanted.

Homepage Design

Stakeholder goals for the new design of the homepage included reducing scroll length and introducing more ways to interact with content. We started with removing the RFI form from the hero, and moved it down to the site footer. When CRO expressed concerns of having no way to access the form below the fold for returning users, we added a button CTA to allow immediate access. We implemented a gallery slider to house visually redundant content, and restructured our layout from the original to create better separations of content to make the rest more scannable. We also added a feature mid-page that would allow users to filter programs by specialization and/or degree level.

Final Page Mockups