Purdue Computer Science website people and research sections redesign

Client: Purdue Department of Computer Science
Role: Designer

In 2023-2024, Emily Kinsell, the department's communications specialist, requested a redesign and overhaul of the People and Research sections of the Computer Science (CS) website. As part of the department's initiative to increase its ranking and attract more faculty, it was necessary to improve the usability and design of those sections. The people section includes directories and profile pages for all faculty and staff. Their information and photos are managed in myCS, an internal department application. The research section also needs to be expanded. I worked with Emily, Dan Trinkle (research computing specialist), Josh Church (full stack developer), and Noah Davis (web systems administrator) on this project.

We redesigned and overhauled these pages:

• People: Faculty & Lecturers directory page
• People: Faculty profile pages, such as Aniket Bera's
• People: Staff directory page
• People: Staff profile pages, such as Amber Stanley's
• Research main page

We also created new pages for:

• People: Offices directory page
• Research area pages, such as Bioinformatics and Computational Biology

From Emily and the department, we needed the list of research areas, the research area images, the faculty affiliated with each research area, the office directory categories, the staff affiliated with each office category, and new faculty and staff photos. The photos need to be taken, resized, and uploaded to myCS.

I designed and built the pages on a demo site. When I finished building the pages in September, I handed off development to Josh and Dan. In January 2024, Noah took over development. In March, the project was put on hold for six months due to staffing changes in the CS department and the College of Science.

In September 2024, Noah continued development. In late October, I worked with Noah to make sure his dynamic pages matched the designed pages. On December 6, I met with the project team and Molly Walker (the new CS communications specialist). We reviewed the project, discussed additional changes, and planned to launch the redesigned sections by December 18. On December 9, I began making updates to the CS website and worked with Noah and Dan to make minor improvements. I finished making changes on December 13 and contacted Emily and Molly. Further changes were needed and made on December 16. The new people and research sections were launched on December 16.

The new sections better position the department to increase its ranking and attract more faculty.

Note: the image below is from the previous research main page design.