CASE STUDY

Building a community of designers at NYU Abu Dhabi

Aka a minimum viable home on the web :)
OVERVIEW
Designing a website for User Experience Abu Dhabi (UXAD), the UX Design organization at NYU Abu Dhabi.
TIMELINE
Spring 2022
TOOLS
Figma
THE PROBLEM

How might we attract students to UXAD? 🤔

This year, I founded User Experience Abu Dhabi (UXAD), a student organization for user experience design enthusiasts at New York University Abu Dhabi.
We host campaigns, events, and workshops to learn and teach UX at NYUAD. Ultimately, we aim to raise the level, maturity, and awareness of UX design on-campus and in the UAE.
To help this mission, I decided to design UXAD's home on the web, where prospective members can better understand our purpose, mission, and events, and ultimately opt to join our team.
DRAFTS

I started with lowfi sketches to plan out the site structure.

I spent the most time thinking about which sections would be most relevant to a student coming across the site, and what would compel them to join UXAD.
I then experimented with different layouts, styles, and ways of presenting the organization, its events, and its call to action (Join!)
THOUGHTS FROM THE PROCESS 🤔
How can I keep it friendly, but professional?
UXAD is definitely a friendly, fun community of enthusiasts, but it's also a place to learn hard skills, network with industry professionals, and take on real design projects.
I had to balance these two brand characteristics in the design to make sure our audience could grasp that we weren't one or the other – we were both.
HIGH-FIDELITY MOCKUPS
Experimenting on Figma!
For the high-fidelity prototypes, I started out sticking very close to my original sketches pictured above.
Then, I experimented with a totally different direction that had a stronger emphasis on style.
However, I ended up shelving this idea. It just didn't make enough sense to dedicate a whole section for events that had already finished, and giving every few lines a whole section made the site very long to scroll (and thus an overall worse user experience.)
Here's where it's at now!
In the end, I decided to ship the minimum viable version of the website for now, especially since User Experience Abu Dhabi itself was beginning to go through structural changes to become a more holistic  organization rather than one focused on UX.

Check it out here!
There's a lot I could still do to make it more responsive, but for now, it does the job, and it taught me a lot of things I'll take to future Webflow projects. Til then, bye!