Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences needed a web site which reflected the school’s professionalism and it needed one that was more usable by its varied audiences.

Challenge
When the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences came to Nodus Solutions, it had a content-rich Web site with no graphics and poor navigational structure, making it difficult for anyone to find relevant content.

There was no distinguishing between content for prospective students versus current students and faculty members, and casual visitors found themselves having to wade through a sea of information just to get to the basics.The site needed to reflect the school’s professionalism and it needed to be more usable by all the user groups.

Solution
Nodus Solutions’ first step was to identify and parse the three audience groups—current students and faculty, prospective students, and casual visitors.

Once the user groups were established, Nodus developed the information architecture and then wire frames for usability testing. During that testing, it was discovered that the majority of the users preferred high-resolution computer screen settings, enabling the graphical interface to be expanded beyond the limitations of the original design criteria of 800x600.