Digital Scholar
Redesigning a site that provides web hosting services for University of Rochester students and faculty.
Team
1 UX Designer
Role
UX Designer & Researcher
Timeline
June 2025 - August 2025
Tools
Figma, Chat GPT, Microsoft Forms
Overview
The Impact
5
6
80+
Introduction
Digital Scholarship is a department within the University of Rochester library that provides free web hosting services to students and faculty.
The Digital Scholarship department manages sites hosted by University of Rochester faculty and staff through a program called Digital Scholar. Digital Scholar users can make personal portfolios, host research data, create sites with class content, and more. The department also has consultation sessions where they canoffer support and resources to users.
The Problem
Digital Scholarship offers services to anyone at UofR, but they have been seeing declining numbers in users. Current users also aren't aware of the range of services the department offers.
The Solution
Conduct research on current, former, and potential users to learn more about their experience and use the feedback to inform a site redesign.
Familiarizing myself with the Digital Scholar site and services.
I started the project by familiarizing myself with Digital Scholarship's current site. I took note of the little information on the site, and tried to create my own account without the departments help, which proved to be challenging.
I also researched how other Universities showed off their web hosting services and created a competitive analysis matrix to track features.
The Digital Scholar site is managed by Reclaim Hosting, which provides web hosting services for universities across the world. Before the redesign, I explored other universities' Reclaim sites and created a competitive analysis matrix to compare what features they promoted on their landing page and how they explained their services.
Competitive Analysis Matrix
To understand how faculty used Digital Scholar, and why some faculty didn't use it at all, I conducted 6 interviews with different users/non-users.
To identify Digital Scholar's pain points, I conducted interviews with current and potential faculty users to understand their experience with the platform. With current faculty users, I wanted to know how they used the platform and what resources they relied on. With potential faculty users, I wanted to understand what their web hosting needs were and why they weren't using Digital Scholar.
I also wanted to know how many students were currently using, or were aware, of the Digital Scholarship department.
To understand student's knowledge of Digital Scholarship as a whole, I created a survey to get a sense of how many students were aware of Digital Scholarship, and how many had used Digital Scholar. If students had used the Digital Scholar, I also wanted to know what their experience was like, what they used it for, and how they learned about it.
Key Insights
Based on the 3 groups I received data from, I was able to find some trends in responders' answers.
Current Faculty Users
Most faculty members who used Digital Scholar had students create the site or database for them. Once the site was created, they tended to feel comfortable maintaining it themselves but were worried about breaking something.
Potential Faculty Users
Faculty members who had use cases but didn't use Digital Scholar paid out of pocket for similar services because they didn't know the department existed or didn't know how to get in contact with them to ask for help.
Student Feedback
We collected 80+ responses from students. Most showed that students weren't aware of Digital Scholar services but had uses for them. Of the students that had used Digital Scholar, most reported being confused by the set up process, but had a positive experience once their accounts were active.
Synthesizing the Findings
To expedite the data review process, I used AI to isolate relevant quotes I could use to make an Affinity Map and User Personas.
I used Chat GPT to transcribe the interviews I conducted, and then had it pull out quotes that referenced pain points, types of usage, experience with the department, and more. I then converted the quotes into sticky notes on FigJam that I could organize into an Affinity Map with the help of Figma's AI agent. Using the trends found on the Affinity Map, I created 3 personas based on the faculty users/non-users I gathered data from.
Affinity Map
Personas
Prototyping
I started my redesign by creating a new information architecture that took into account the feedback I received during user testing.
To start the redesign of Digital Scholarship's site, I planned what pages would be featured, and how they could be structured to best serve users' needs. I considered how other Reclaim Hosting sites were organized using what I learned from the competitive analysis matrix, and focused on highlighting content with each persona in mind.
I then created wireframes for the pages that didn't natively exist through Reclaim Hosting.
With the wireframes complete, I met with my team to review my work. I received feedback on how to clean up spacing and design details that I applied to the final prototype.
reflection
