UX Team Page

Team Members
Bowei Xu, Chaoqun Huang, Qiwei Zhou

Team target

Our team aims to design and build a user-friendly interface for the website. Our work covers design, refactoring current pages and gathering feedback.

What is a good UI?

A good UI gives customers good experience when they visit the website. What makes a great UI? Apart from fast response speed, first, it is crucial that all visitors, with or without specific background knowledge, can understand what the interface is talking about, like what to fill in this blank and where this button leads. Second, important pages, like index pages or sub-index pages, should be accessible from any other page on the website(by adopting a navigation bar, for instance). Third, UI style should be consistent across all pages to strive for smoothest transition when users walk across our web pages. Also the style should be adapted to most users' comfort that font, background and other elements won't cause negative feeling of customers. We have gathered some guide and documentation for UI design:

Design V1.0

Design

For the first version, we want to clear up the web with a more organized UI. To acheive this, we first think about adding a navigation bar that allows users to access all links anywhere on the website. So after several discussions, we choose the collapsible side bar for the following reason.

1. The nav bar only occupies a small area of screen, leaving most space for contents.
2. Animations are cool.

Deployment

We are working on a plan to refactor the entire website with our new stylesheet. In order to minimize the impact on others' work and make it more flexible for future updates, we are thinking about making a global header file that includes all common elements for all pages, such as stylesheet, js function and navigation bar. In this way, we could replace all these repeating elements by the include clause we currently have and future updates will only take place on this file.