User Interface Design
Houston Science Festival
Bridges to Science is a Houston-based nonprofit that expands access to STEM education for students in underserved communities.
The Houston Science Festival – Science Week is their largest annual initiative, bringing together museums, universities, nonprofits, and community organizations for a week of hands-on STEM experiences across Houston.
This project focuses on improving the festival website to make it easier for visitors to discover events, support the organization, and engage with the festival.
View Prototype
Overview
Site Auditing
Wireframing
Launch
Outcome
With this project, I accomplished the following:
3+
Website Pages Designed
Overview
The current site already contains the core information needed for the festival. The goal is not to rebuild everything from scratch, but to improve usability, navigation, and overall user experience while keeping the existing content structure where appropriate. Outcome
Create an interactive map and events calendar that will fit into the current website’s structure and improve user experience. The interactive map allows users to find events closest to them by entering their zip code or city.
Who This Affects
This new feature will allow families to easily find events near them. We want to improve usability for them so they can find event information and receive GPS directions while improving the user experience.
Research & Anaylsis
When looking at inspiration from other organizations, I took to grocery stores such as Trader Joe’s and ALDI for inspiration. What interested me the most was:
- Aldi’s information placement
- Trader Joe’s indivdual store Information under each location
The biggest sources of inspiration for me were the buttons to get directions, recieve store details, and the ability to filter stores by specific needs.
Wireframing & Building
Wireframes are built through Figma with a little help from Relume.ai and UXPilot for ideation. Aside from the interactive map’s separate page, I created a section on the website’s home page that will lead to the interactive event finder web page.
A section on the homepage shows all events sorted by day, with a button that will show the interactive map and all events for the week. Underneath each event is a quick link to view the event’s details.
The event finder portion of the website is meant to help simplify users’ journey as they celebrate Houston Science Week. Users can search for events near them by entering their city or ZIP code. Each event has two buttons: one to get directions, and another to view event details.
Users can filter out the events they want to view by event days now. The interactive map and search results will show events on the selected day, making it easier to reach the end goal (finding an event).
Event detail pages include links to directions and an overview of other events happening on the same day. This makes navigation for the users easier, as they now have the option to go back to the map, view other events they might be interested in or view all information for an individual event.
Outcome
A website that fully supports and promotes Houston Science Week’s events, providing different levels of information for interested users. Navigation has also been made easier with filtering features, event details and event direction links. Developers will take the design and implement into their Wordpress site.
Insight
The development of this website was to streamline the process of finding events and their details, allowing me to dive deep into the innerworkings of Figma and interactive website prototypes. Since this wasn’t a full website redesign, a lot of consideration went into making sure this new section would naturally fit into the website’s architecture as well.