CLIENT | The University of Chicago Consortium of School Research
The Challenge
Develop a new web-based storytelling approach to unlock the Consortium's vast research library and make it accessible for a broad range of users from individual educators to policymakers. Create a visual design that showcases the work and stories of UChicago Consortium’s research and maximizes its utilization. Build the tools that allow non-technical staff at UChicago Consortium to share, disseminate and connect a wide range of audiences with Consortium research into the future.
For 31 years, the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research (UChicago Consortium) has researched and provided solutions to the greatest challenges facing urban schools. The Consortium has built an extensive body of knowledge that is widely used in Chicago and around the country.
As researchers, The Consortium team knew their audiences well. However, they did not agree on or have a plan for the best way to serve them. Working with the GEEKPAK team, I facilitated an empathy mapping workstream with the client to externalize all user knowledge and collaborated to build a journey map. Given the client’s budget, I had to find creative and efficient ways to understand users’ goals and their use cases for the Consortium’s information, their journeys, and the frictions they encountered along the way.
Navigation System: A simple solution for complex information
A sophisticated yet elegant navigation system was critical to accommodate different user types and idiosyncratic research styles. In my design, the top nav is UChicago Consortium information and search. The main navigation is broken into Student Oriented Research and information on Organizations and Systems. The third navigation is for main topic pages; it helps users get into the information they need the most.
Wireframes: excellent communication between design and development
Working closely with the developer at GeekPAK, I drew up and tested a great number of wireframes to get a feel for flow and user interaction. I focused specifically on new ways to tell stories and increase users’ ability to access information.
“How do we maximize the use and value of our research library? The data is still good. How do we repackage to relate to current events?”
Storytelling
The design I created allowed the UChicago staff to group and highlight the key topics thematically and then guide users through a suite of related but distinct bodies of research, data points, visuals, etc. In turn, users could follow a narrative story while gleaning insights and data from academic research that would otherwise be inaccessible. The navigation on the left allowed users to sift through highlighted studies that compiled years of research and documents. Meanwhile, users still had an easy way to navigate into deeper content and studies if desired.
Page types: distinct designs to serve distinct user needs
White paper page layout (left) has key questions or findings at the top to help the user quickly understand what questions the researchers were trying to answer and the big picture takeaway was from the research. The right column had all of the different downloads that each user type was looking for to share information or present to audiences.
Key findings rotator layout (center) displayed topic pages to show the key findings and data points for each section. Just below the rotator are the top resources for each topic so researchers can get the top information quickly and dig deeper.
Large case studies layout (left) allowed the staff to tell a story about a particular research topic that could involve numerous white papers.