University of Washington, Tacoma: Office of the Ombud
The Client: University of Washington, Tacoma Office of the Ombud
My Role: Graphic Designer
The Ask: Redesign and re-organize the UW Tacoma Office of the Ombud website
When: Fall 2021
Industry: Education
Tools: Drupal
My Role: Graphic Designer
The Ask: Redesign and re-organize the UW Tacoma Office of the Ombud website
When: Fall 2021
Industry: Education
Tools: Drupal
The University of Washington:
Tacoma Office of the Ombud
Tacoma Office of the Ombud
The University of Washington Office of the Ombud serves all University of Washington students, faculty, and staff, including clients from the Tacoma, Bothell, and UW Med campuses.
The Challenge
Because of COVID-19, the office went completely remote and had to transition from accepting clients/client requests in person to receiving most requests online. The primary website was updated, but the Tacoma website had not received the same treatment.
The Website Before
Before, the website lacked the personality that the main website had.
Some notes our team identified:
Menu Items could be reduced. Schedule and Appointment + Contact Us could go into one category with a clear Appointments CTA across all pages.
Add a header image to stay on-brand with the UW Seattle website.
Create buttons for the Annual Report and Our Mission sections, to break up content.
Adding resources with useful information was an idea one of our Ombudspeople. I thought we could also include the Common Concerns in this tab as well as a catch-all.
Competitor Research
Benchmarking similar Office of the Ombud websites. Below are a couple examples that I and the team identified as valuable inspiration.
Wireframed Sitemap
A sitemap I created to present to the Ombudspeople
Final Website
The final website includes a condensed menu with only four options, limiting the amount of time spent on the landing page. The landing page itself also includes links to the the office’s COVID-19 operations and most recent Annual Report. The resources section is broken up into 3 dropdown menus named staff, faculty, and students. Links to schedule an appointment are also ample throughout the site, included on the “Services” and “Contact Us” page.
Separate cards were added for the Annual Report and COVID-19 Office operations. This breaks up content on the page and also includes important information/common questions about the office.
🎉 After redesigning this website in December 2021, our team noticed a decrease in the amount of inquiries (”How do I make an appointment?”) with the overall number of appointments staying consistent. 🎉
