FBAUL’s Alumni Page
Project for Post Graduation in Digital Experience Design - Belas Artes - Lisbon University. For this project, we created a website page for Belas Artes Alumni. The page did not exist on the university's website before.
My role
Nov - Dec 2023
Academic Project — Postgraduate, University of Lisbon
Mariana Gonçalves, Amy Moraes, Carolina Cipriano
Challenge
Our group was given the task of developing concrete solutions to improve the user experience of the Alumni segment on the FBAULs website.
There is no dedicated space on the platform for this segment, so we had to start from scratch.
This will be accomplished through the development of concrete solutions based on the needs and goals from both alumni and FBAUL.
Process
The Problem
Context
Fine arts faculty of the university of lisbon or FBAUL for short:
Oldest higher education school of artistic education in Portugal.
more than 1000 students.
bachelors, masters and Phd degrees.
courses in sculpture, painting, multimedia art, communication design, interior design and sciences of art and heritage.
The website is a space where potential candidates, students and staff can access all official information and services. The community events and activities related to the school.
Discover
Alumni
singular noun: alumnus
Concept:
A graduate or former student of a particular school, college, or university.
"a Harvard alumnus".
A former member of a group, company, or organization.
"a Royal Ballet alumnus".
“Being an alumni is to live with a sense of belonging to an origin where we were happy and created friendships. (...) Being an alumni is to have an eternal connection to one of the most powerful networking and influencers. (...) Being an alumni is carrying the values of your university with pride. Having a unique and very particular brand in your DNA.”
- Drª Sofia Gomes
Translated expert from an opinion article of the weekly newspaper Vida Económica.
A strong relationship between an institution and their alumni can be hugely beneficial to both of them. Without it, FBAUL is losing out on a lot of potential.
Benchmarking
Competitors & Non-competitors
While analysing direct competitors, we noticed that very few Portuguese art universities had specific areas for alumni on their websites.
On the other hand, business and economics schools had pages for alumni and various services like:
National and International Alumni Associations
Give back - volunteer, sponsor and fundraise
Business hubsCareers and talent office
Get Involved - be a mentor, ambassador
Events - class reunions, conferences, career awards
Keep learning - alumni discounts on enrolment for other courses & ongoing support
FBAUL page
Although FBAUL doesn’t have a page for alumni, ULisboa has a page that features the alumni association.
We conducted an analysis of the page to understand how it works and what services it offers to the university's alumni.
The alumni page of the ULisboa presents some benefits of being a member of the association and information about employability. however, it could improve in the following areas:
Information hierarchy and navigation
Highlight information about the specific benefits of being a member
Further explore information about employability
Have more prominence on the University's homepage
We now understood what alumni communities are, what their institutions are doing to cater to their needs and how catering to these needs benefits these institutions. But we still had a big question left unanswered...
“What do FBAUL alumni seek from FBAUL after graduating?”
Survey and Interviews
To answer this question and other questions, we still had in mind related to alumni users we applied a survey and interviews.
Insights
After gathering all insights from this research we started to get a grasp of what FBAUL alumni needed from FBAUL and the main problems that they were facing.
How might we
With all of these insights we were left with a lot of questions to ponder about...
Deliver
Solution
After deciding which solutions we were going to apply to our project we started working on the structure of our pages and section, how they were going to be connected, how they were going to appear and what content they should have.
We decided to mostly keep the visual identity of FBAULs website in our solution, only making small tweaks were we found necessary.
We also decided to prototype our solution for desktop only.
User test
In order to evaluate the interface, we conducted a Usability Test using Maze as a tool. The test revealed some sensitive areas that we could review afterwards.
