The Department of Human Resources at the University of Alabama in Birmingham (UAB) is responsible for approximately 21,000 faculty and staff and over 53,000 jobs within both the university and the healthcare system, so when Alicia Johnson, Director of Human Resources called upon me to assess and re-design the department’s website, I embarked on a six month intensive assignment.

After a round of interviews with all interdepartmental heads and round table discussions with sample groups of employees, I got a good idea as to where the problems were with the old website:  The navigation was “clunky” and information was not easily found and then when it was, it was difficult to then cross-navigate to other areas of the site. Search results rankings were mediocre and load-time often would drag along. A major overhaul was undertaken.

In short, after the interviews and informal discussions with employees I then took a look at site analytics over a period of the prior 18 months. After pulling in these factors, I plotted a graph with trends and looked for holes, patterns in viewer interest (or lack thereof) and wrote a detailed assessment and then presented it before Director Johnson and inter-departmental leadership.

The next step in the process, or “the fun part” as I like to say because of my background in Graphic Design, was the actual design of the interface. The site navigation is the skeleton for any site and the content needed to be classified, sorted, checked for errors and at times, purged in order to make way for the most current information.

After the process of designing a new interface was complete, next I had to implement my design coupled with the new content in Joomla, which is the Content Management System in use by the university.

The new site launched with great fanfare and feedback from those who used it most, the employees was again essential. As I iterated many times during this project and with others, a website is a living document. The strength of the internet is its ability to deliver information to users at an instant; updates, revisions and replacement of content is done on a continual basis. With the launch of the new Human Resources site for the University of Alabama in Birmingham, information was much more available to employees; content was consistent (which strengthened the UAB brand) and especially important, employees now felt as though their voices had been heard. They were a part of the process from beginning to end. Success!