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 for students and faculty.
The Digital Scholarship department manages sites hosted by University of Rochester faculty and staff through a platform 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 can offer support and resources to users.
The Problem
Digital Scholarship offers services to anyone at UR, but there has been a decline in new users. Current users were also unaware of the different services the department offered.
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.
Research
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 lack of information on the site, and tried to create my own account without departmental support, which proved to be challenging.
Original Site
I 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 internationally. 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 asked about 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.
To understand how many students were using or aware of the Digital Scholarship department, I created a survey.
To determine students' 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 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 felt more 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. Either they didn't know the department existed, or didn't know how to access it.
Student Feedback
Of the 80+ responses collected from students, most were unaware 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 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, and experience with the department. I converted the quotes into sticky notes on FigJam to organize into an Affinity Map using an AI agent. With the trends found on the Affinity Map, I created 3 personas based on data gathered from faculty users/non-users.
Affinity Map
Personas
Prototyping
I started the redesign by creating a new Information Architecture that addressed users' feedback.
To start the redesign of Digital Scholar's site, I selected which pages to feature to best serve users' needs and explain the department's purpose. I considered how other Reclaim Hosting sites were organized using results from the competitive analysis matrix, and focused on content that would benefit each persona.
Next, I created wireframes for the pages, focusing on adding content that wasn't natively available through Reclaim Hosting.
With the wireframes complete, I met with the department to review my progress. I received feedback on how to clean up spacing and design details that I applied to the final prototype.
reflection
