UC Davis College of Letters & Sciences IT Department

Play the Knave - Weebly to SiteFarm Migration

(Coming soon…) Click here to view the new "Play the Knave" website.

Overview

Play the Knave is an “award-winning digital game [that] provides a new way for students to learn Shakespeare. The game "combines a karaoke-style interface with mixed reality to help students perform dramatic scenes." It was created by UC Davis English Professor Gina Bloom, alongside other faculty and students.

Goal

Complete a full migration of original Weebly site to Drupal/SiteFarm, making improvements to UI/UX while staying true to original text and theming.

Improvements

The common UI/UX issues I noticed in the overall site were the big blocks of unformatted text. It was causing a lot of cognitive overload, and made it feel like a bit of a chore for visitors to read through.

A good example of this can be seen on the homepage. On the original website, the first section right below the banner is very dense with information, and lacks initial attraction. Visitors don't get a good sense of what the project is about without having to sift through lots of text.

The solution? I decided to split this one block of text into three different sections:

• An introduction section with a featured video

• The key selling points of the game

• An "About Us" section

Each section feels as though it holds more importance now that they are highlighted separately. This makes the information much more digestible, without having to condense any of the original text.

English Department - Homepage Redesign

Click here to view the English Department website.

Overview

I worked directly with the head of the English Department at UC Davis, Tobias Menely, to make improvements to the entire English website. The biggest changes were made to the homepage, featured below.

Goal

Improve the homepage to be more attractive to visitors, and better highlight the department.

Improvements

Physics Department - SiteFarm Migration

Click here to view the new Physics Department website.

Overview

I worked alongside another Assistant Content Manager, as well as my supervisor, to complete this site migration. We were tasked with manually moving all content from the Physics Department site built with an older CMS system to a newer SiteFarm website. The Physics site is one of the largest websites in the entire College of Letters and Sciences.

Goal

Migrate all content from the original Physics Department website to a new SiteFarm site, while also improving/modernizing the UI/UX where needed.

Improvements

Below are the updates we made to the homepage as an example of the type of improvements we were able to make.

Personal Reflection

Working in UC Davis LSIT was definitely a fun challenge as a designer. I'm used to doing most of my work in programs like Figma or Adobe, where I have the freedom to make any design choices I want. However, working with a CMS like Drupal/SiteFarm for the first time was very limiting. It sometimes felt like I was fighting the built-in blocks to get the look I wanted.

However, I also think these "limitations" also taught me to be more creative. There were times where I would ask my supervisor for help with making my pages look a certain way, and after some clicking around he would say, "Wow, you stumped me with that one." I think I really pushed the limits of SiteFarm with how many customizations I had to come up with (which also helped me brush up on my CSS skills).