Case study
The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) publishes student and institutional data for Texas’ colleges and universities. I helped design a new site to make their data accessible to the public and accommodate their diverse users.
THECB, also known as the Board, collects data on students and universities from all higher education institutions in Texas. Previously, the Board’s web ecosystem was complex, with challenging navigation and information scattered across various websites. Most of their education data was presented in dense spreadsheets or lengthy PDFs.
My goal was to consolidate and present THECB education data to target users in a way that promotes understanding and helps the Board better advocate for Texas higher education.
User experience design, UX research, and Data visualization. I led UX research, Information architecture, Wireframing, and prototyping for this project.
Medium sized project team (Including myself and 2 other designers).
2022.
Work with key stakeholders to define priorities and target audiences.
Conduct interviews and card sorting with target user groups: researchers, legislators, and education administrators.
Define an information architecture and modular design system that serves diverse audience needs.
Implement MVP and iterate through usability testing.
Initially the project specifications were vague. The Board had an overwhelmingly extensive, unorganized amount of content. My team and I started with internal stakeholder discovery activities including a survey and workshops to pin down target audiences and goals for the new public data website.The discovery work helped uncover a much clearer direction. Stakeholders highlighted ease of access as their primary goal, meaning that navigation had to be a key priority. We also restricted the scope to existing audiences rather than expanding to new audiences.
While students and parents are important as the people most impacted by the Board’s data, stakeholders decided that the “priority audiences” for the website needed to be the people who drive change using the data - institutional administrators, policy makers, and institutional researchers.
After initial discovery, I directly engaged target users—Texas policymakers, institutional administrators, and institutional researchers—through interviews. All participants were current users of THECB's websites. Interestingly, their preferences diverged by role, with institutional researchers desiring raw data for their own exploratory analysis, policymakers favoring explanatory experiences with clear visualizations, and administrators exhibiting mixed preferences.
Based on my discovery work with folks at the THECB, I knew that clear navigation needed to be a priority in the site. This was underlined by my findings from the interviews—all participants experienced difficulty due to the navigation of the current THECB sites being unintuitive.
I conducted a card sorting activity with users to inform content categorization. My goal was to align information architecture with users’ mental models, resulting in three main content groups based on the college lifecycle: pre college, applications/enrollment, and outcomes/graduation.
I synthesized my research into 5 key design priorities to guide the team in site design.
Defining the information architecture for the new public data site involved two key decisions.The first was how to handle the distinct explanatory/exploratory split in user needs for data reports. The second was how to categorize data that didn’t fall neatly into the lifecycle structure identified in card sorting.
To cater to diverse user needs, my team and I opted for two report styles: Explanatory "data reports" with straightforward visualizations and key takeaways, and exploratory "interactive data" pages with complex, interactive visualizations allowing users to filter and manipulate data for their own personalized takeaways.
Because the main priority for the site was easy access to the data, I placed top level data topics in the main navigation. I reviewed 200+ reports from previous THECB sites to group data into subtopics and topics. Defining a taxonomy for data topics required several iterations of user testing since the Board did not have a predefined taxonomy.
I used component based design to help develop a design system for the Board that would be modular and scalable. Because time and budget for the project were limited, I collaborated with developers and visual designers to minimize the number of components, ensuring the project’s development effort remained in scope for our MVP.
I designed wireframes for the site and worked with the client, developers, and designers to refine them. You can view the wireframes presented to the Board for review here: Figma Wireframes. My designs prioritized showcasing THECB’s depth of data and connecting users to that data in a relevant, timely manner.
I worked with the visual designer on my team who translated my component definitions into high fidelity mockups. Our goal was to modernize the THECB’s brand while providing a trustworthy feeling for users. Check out the final design here: Figma design.
I continued to refine the site's design and navigation during content writing and component implementation, and ran a first-click test when content writing faced initial delays. Users were drawn to the search function of the site and had a high level of confidence in their ability to navigate the new site. They were also able to locate various specific data reports with a moderate success rate. I used these findings to identify which data topics needed to be renamed for clarity. Because users were able to distinguish the intended audience and purpose of the explanatory and exploratory report formats, this test helped validate my decision to split report types based on intended audience.
The MVP version of the Board's site was successfully launched in November 2022. Visit the current website at https://data.highered.texas.gov. Ongoing efforts by THECB involve continuous publication of data reports on the site, ensuring the accessibility of higher education data for the state of Texas to its users.
