We are excited to announce the launch of the redesigned site for the Purchasing Department! Purchasing is one of four departments within Finance and Facilities Management. All four department sites and the main Finance and Facilities Management website underwent a major overhaul. The images above are a quick comparison of the old Purchasing site (left) vs. the redesign (right).

After speaking with the Purchasing Department and much discussion, the frustration with the old site stemmed down to “way too much information at once,” also know as information overload. While there was a lot of good information on the site, it was hard for the user to readily find the information important to them because of how it was being presented.

These were our major goals:

• To organize and group content to create a functioning information hierarchy that will increase the readability (scanning) of information that matters to the user.
• To redefine the identity of the Purchasing Department through branding and use of color to better inform the university community of what they do as well as instill who they are.
• To create a navigation that is easy to use and is intuitive for the user to quickly find the page they are looking for with pertinent information.

The new Purchasing Department site evokes a much calmer feeling compared to its old design. The use of space, images, color and reorganization of content immensely improved the user experience.

You can check out the site at: http://purchasing.wayne.edu/

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 10:52 am and is filed under launch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.