National Institute of Health
•
UI/UX Designer
2023
Web Portal for Research Consortium
UX Design
Interactive Prototyping
The Team
1 x Product Designer
1 x Content Writer
1 × Project Manager
3 × Developers
My Contribution
UX Design
UI Design
UX Strategy
UX Research
Duration
1 yr. and 7 mo.
JAN 2023 - AUG 2024
Client
NIH (National Institute of Health)
Context
The Coordination, Communication, and Operations Support (CCOS) team supports the NIH’s CTSA Program—a national network of 60+ medical institutions accelerating the translation of research into real-world health solutions.
I led the end-to-end design of a web portal in Figma to support 31K+ users in connecting, collaborating, and accessing resources. I was the sole designer and collaborated closely with developers and project managers to ensure a seamless handoff and a product that balanced user needs with technical feasibility.
Problem
A research consortia of over 60+ medical and research institutions needed a platform for users to stay engaged with the consortia and their designated groups.
Solution
I worked with the client to identify key business needs and implemented a human-centered design approach to for each feature request.
Results
Compared to their original web portal, we have doubled user engagement and increased conversion rates by 80%.
Process
This project had a very tight and strict budget and quick turnaround so I was constantly challenged. I learned to be creative and flexible so I could still incorporate user research to help inform design decisions.
When a new feature request was submitted, I began the process with research and gathering information. If available, I would reference the previous web portal and conducted a heuristic evaluation to determine areas for improvements. I also interviewed project stakeholders to learn how previous designs performed in the past. This helped me identify and understand potential user pain points and needs.
From my interviews, I learned that one of the largest pain points of the previous portal was that users had was navigation . I conducted a review and found that many items and resources were nested too deeply within the navigation system, making things hard to find.
At the very beginning of this project, I constructed a site map to help our team organize the website's architecture. This helped us tremendously in the long run, because the site expanded quickly. We were able to keep our navigation intuitive while still having flexibility to add new sections.
Site Map
Research
Stakeholder Interviews
One of our feature requests was integrating a proposal form where users could fill out a form and submit it into our portal. I conducted interviews with key stakeholders to learn more about the form's purpose, our team's goals, and how the previous form performed.
Identified 2 User Types
1. Users who submitted a form
2. Users who reviewed the submissions
Heuristic Evaluation
I conducted a heuristic evaluation of the previous web form to identify areas for improvement for the new form to be more user friendly and accessible for our users.
Old Submission Form
Design
I created a prototype for this specific feature request because there of it's many moving parts. This helped me convey interaction behaviors to our development team and also help tell the story when I pitched my solution to the rest of the team.
New Submission Proposal Form
Customized Form Elements
Outcome
I also received an email from the client that the promise she made deliver a “simple and easy-to-use proposal process,” has been fulfilled with my design solution.
The web form was only one feature out of many. Though my design process remained mostly consistent for every feature request, I worked on other features for the portal as well.
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