Redesign the RIT News and Events webpage to be more engaging and user friendly

In preparation for this project, I checked out a lot of different news sites including Fox News, New York Times, CNN, and ESPN. I studied not only the main types of content these platforms supplied to their users, but also how that information was laid out for maximum clarity. All of the websites were jam packed with information, but used hierarchy and white space to lead the eye of the user and make it less over whelming. I tried to mirror these design principals in my own redesign.

I chose two styles to play with, including one that was more modern and one that was more old-fashioned. In the end, my redesign ended up being a hybrid of the two.

Here I leaned heavily on the gestalt principals of proximity to create hierarchy 

In my first iteration, I focused on grouping like pieces of information together, and guiding the viewer from the most-important information to the least-important information as we scroll down the page. I worked to create hierarchy, especially the "more top stories" section.

In the second iteration I refined the "sports" section to be more readable and scanable. To do this I took inspiration from the ESPN website. 

Sometimes it feels that sports are ignored at RIT, even though we have some really successful teams. I really wanted to highlight the sports section and make it easy for students to find games and scores to increase school pride about this part of the community.

For the "calender" section, I highlighted events that are happening today and tomorrow. I chose to do this because RIT news and events is a daily newsletter. Because of this, people could be specifically interested in events that are happening on that evening. Especially students, who are more likely to be spontaneous planners. 

For the final iteration, I made the links at the top into clickable buttons. 

I made the "more top stories" panel less static to add interest, as well as to add a "more top headlines" section to add even more information to the page. 

I further refined the "sports" section to add a "sports highlights" section and make the "weekly scorecard" more readable.

I increased the white space between the different sections, as well as alternating a grey background for every other section to help group topics. 

This project taught me how important designing for users is. The people who would most likely be reading RIT News and Events were students, parents of students, and faculty. Knowing this, it was really important to highlight the sports and events section, use lots of pictures, and add the date and location at the top of the piece. 

I really enjoyed going through the iterations because I feel like each one improved in a big way on the last one.