Fashion zine website redesign
SUMMARY
Managed team of developers and designers on expanding pre-existing website structure. Focuses were in home page redesign, resolving residual bugs, and optimizing processes to improve backend performance.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
The TREND website functions as a central hub for blogs, issues, and events, and its early-stage build struggled to guide visitors to key services and keep pace with evolving brand needs. This led to discovery and navigation friction for readers and operational pain for staff, motivating a focused iteration to strengthen the landing experience and expand content pathways.
SUPPLEMENTAL
ROLE(S)
Design
Development
Project Management
CONTEXT
Contract
TEAM
Angelo Belardo, Nelson Chen, Jay Gao, Olivia Garrett, Edna Ho, Catherine Hoang, William Kam, Janhavi Shan, Zander Vilaysane
PLATFORMS
Website, Desktop/Mobile
CLIENT
TREND Magazine @ UC San Diego
TIMELINE
Oct 24' - June 25'
PROCESS
( 1 ) User Research
Deployed surveys to students not involved in TREND as well as former/current TREND staff members to gauge existing impressions of prior website shipment.
Followed up with survey participants interested in in-depth interviews to uncover navigation friction and existing impressions of brand identity.
Coordinated with TREND Executive Board to define refinement goals of artist visibility and clarified brand identities.
( 2 ) Insights
Many users enjoyed the feel and branding of the existing website, but felt it was bare in information.
Interviewers (most being TREND staff) sought more visibility in their work in the displays of the website.
Executive board wanted to keep branding with slight adjustments to modernize. Directors of various creative teams also wanted further visibility of work.
( 3 ) Solution
Information displayed requires section for recent events, blogs, and magazine issues.
Placing more visual media to fill in spaces and personify branding as representative of the TREND community.
Construct onboarding and handoff preparations for future terms to streamline term transitions.
( 4 ) Testing & Iteration
User testing showed that the loading of the staff photos were incredibly slow.
User testing also showcased UI cross-platform bug. On issues page, users found difficulty in reading hover-only visible descriptions on mobile.
Users validated the visual updates of being consistent with TREND branding and modernized success.
OUTCOME
Cohesive Landing page that provides many visual cues representative of TREND staff work.
Created about, contact pages: improving brand definition and outreach bridges
Improving usability for mobile breakpoints
ENDING REMARKS
Designing with User-First Initiatives
Designs stemmed from a strong foundation of approaching high-demands needs. With a needs-first approach, fidelities iterated quickly as we built with intention and confidence. Applying an existing branding guideline followed quickly after.
Researching with Direct Stakeholders is Strongly Insightful
Speaking directly with the people who use the website frequently (staff editors, event leads, stylists) surfaced practical pain points and edge cases analytics missed. Those conversations turned assumptions into testable requirements, aligned scope, and reduce refactoring by grounding decisions in real workflows.
Defining Current Scope and Prepping Future Scope
Building and iterating on the sub functions to upkeep the website, the transfer documentation became a thorough piece on how the cross-functional teams can optimally iterate throughout the term. Documentation involves handoffs of existing prototypes for prospective features, proposal for a CMS integration for more frequent, simpler data updates, and more specified role tasks for internal development.
visual artifacts
Landing Page Iterations
About Page Variants
