LMS Desktop Information Architecture Redesign

My role

Lead Product Designer — research, prototyping, leadership, contributing to design, interaction with stakeholders, mentorship, defining processes, creating vision and strategy.

Background

High School of Economics — one of the leading and most renowned universities in Russia, founded in 1992. Since then, dozens of products have been created that needed improvements. The company required a change in product strategy, a transformation of the approach to user-centric design planning, as well as the creation of a unified ecosystem for seamless transition between HSE products.

Summary

As a Lead Designer, my mission was to embed a user-centric approach into our workflow. The HSE LMS project was a pioneering initiative where I demonstrated the product design approach using top-tier UX practices. In my role, focusing on student access, I conducted a thorough analysis of existing data, set objectives in collaboration with the product lead, and established UX OKRs for various stages, breaking them down into targeted tasks aimed at achieving both specific outcomes and overarching goals. I steered this process using agile methodologies, including daily meetings and demos, coupled with mentorship and open communication, to ensure successful implementation and continuous improvement.

Results

KPIs to Target:

• Increase User Adoption Rate by 20% within the next year.

• Improve Course Completion Rates by 15% within six months.

• Raise Student and Faculty Satisfaction Scores by 25% within the next academic year.

What does a career in web design involve?

A career in website design can involve the design, creation, and coding of a range of website types. Other tasks will typically include liaising with clients and discussing website specifications, incorporating feedback, working on graphic design and image editing, and enabling multimedia features such as audio and video. Requiring a range of creative and technical skills, web designers may be involved in work across a range of industries, including software companies, IT consultancies, web design companies, corporate organizations, and more. In contrast with web developers, web designers tend to play a more creative role, crafting the overall vision and design of a site, and determining how to best incorporate the necessary functionality. However, there can be significant overlap between the roles.

Full-stack, back-end, and front-end web development

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Occupational Outlook Handbook tends to group web developers and digital designers into one category. However, they define them separately, stating that web developers create and maintain websites and are responsible for the technical aspects including performance and capacity. Web or digital designers, on the other hand, are responsible for the look and functionality of websites and interfaces. They develop, create, and test the layout, functions, and navigation for usability. Web developers can focus on the back-end, front-end, or full-stack development, and typically utilize a range of programming languages, libraries, and frameworks to do so. Web designers may work more closely with front-end engineers to establish the user-end functionality and appearance of a site.

Are web designers in demand in 2022?

In our ever-increasingly digital environment, there is a constant need for websites—and therefore for web designers and developers. With 17.4 billion websites in existence as of January 2020, the demand for web developers is only expected to rise.Web designers with significant coding experience are typically in higher demand, and can usually expect a higher salary. Like all jobs, there are likely to be a range of opportunities, some of which are better paid than others. But certain skill sets are basic to web design, most of which are key to how to become a web designer in 2022.