Redesigning,
With a Purpose
Designer, Researcher — June 2025 to Present
Interned at the Relational Life Institute, redesigning the website to better fit the business needs, branding guidelines, and user experience. Led the project, working with interdisciplinary teams in a non-agile environment as the head website designer to facilitate the research, design and development of the process. Focused on internal page structure, information architecture, and discoverability of site.
Framing’ Cool Stuff
While starting the ideation process using Relume, I realized that the site felt flat, and needed a different workflow that allowed for more flexibility. Using the Relume site as a guide, I created our very own UI Kit for the institute, with the goal of making the components reusable for future sites while speeding up the design and development process.
Wireframing took longer than anticipated because we moved directly into a high fidelity mockup before we were ready, and redesigned pages that were being saved for later. After realizing and acknowledging this mistake, we went back to wireframing with basic structures and components. Once the wireframes were finished, we moved directly to prototyping to measure the success of our work.
To make the UI kit, I first started with sketches of the Relume site, illustrating what was effective from the design and excluding what wasn’t. With this, I was able to affirm what was needed for each component, and what was able to be changed.
Prototyping Craziness
Prototyping the website required an intricate weaving of all of the available webpages into the navigation. When conducting our heuristic evaluation and an expert review, we found that the navigation naming conventions and information architecture was costing users a lot of time to get from point A to B. Making sure the information architecture of the site was well established was the biggest priority of this project to ensure all webpages would have the same visibility and navigability on the site.
After the prototyping portion of the website, we were able to conduct usability tests on the site with a small number of users, ranging from Relational Life Institute experts, faculty, and new users. These usability tests helped shape the redesign of our dropdown menus, which turned into mega menus for the usability of the user, since nobody wants 8 dropdown links in a column to choose from.
Speaking of point A to B, we conducted A/B tests to make sure that our new site was meeting the standards we set out for. During this A/B test, we discovered that our website navigability was 56% faster than the original website, and users were actually able to find what they needed given a certain set of tasks. The new website’s architecture and design was effective in helping users find what they need, where they needed it
Throughout this journey, I learned that sticking to the UX basics is the way to go. When I was getting onboarded on the project as a “website designer”, the team was looking for a beautiful, self explanatory website that just displayed the information that they needed in a compelling way.
Another lesson learned from that is advocacy. I was advocating for the research, taking steps back and reimagining our approach, using certain menus instead of others, how long information should be for a user, and many more things. One way I helped advocate for these decisions was through studies, research, and literature. I referenced the Nielsen Norman Group’s work a lot throughout this journey, and many others who have helped shape the world of UX.
Overall, this project was very rewarding, and will start to be rolling out early next year.
©2025, Manuel Gonzalez Jimenez
