UC Berkeley EECS: Faculty Homepage
Tech changemakers, journalists, incoming freshmen- a diverse audience with one thing in common: an average of 130 seconds to reach their goal. My redesign cut that by 40%.
Role
UX Designer
Collaboration
EECS External Relations Team
Tools
Figma, WordPress
The project no one assigned me
I'm a web intern for the EECS Department, and I have a habit: when I finish my work early, I look for more. One day, I found a card buried in our team's Trello board titled: "Faculty Homepage." I asked my supervisor about it, and he told me the old faculty pages needed a visual refresh to match the new university rebrand.
That was the whole brief. So that's where my journey began.
What did the brief say?
My beautiful, wrong first draft
I dove into a competitive analysis: Stanford, MIT, Haas. And honestly speaking, I was looking almost entirely at aesthetics. What looked clean, analyzing the shapes and colors, observing white space.
I pulled what I loved into a Figma draft: Stanford's personal circular image, and Haas's expandable sections. I then presented it at our weekly sync. My supervisor and co-intern loved the direction.
Approved.
Clean. On-brand. Done.
Couldn't be more wrong.
A senior designer who advises me looked at it afterwards and asked one question that became my catalyst:
"It looks pretty, but what's the problem you're trying to solve?"
I'd designed for the brand, not for the people using the page. That was the moment I learned the difference between simply designing and designing for humans.
The pivot from UI to UX
I went back to my supervisor and asked, again, what the real problem was. He gave me the same answer, but this time, different words stood out to me:
"The goal is for our website to better serve our community."
How I found the real problem
I major in Cognitive Science, not EECS, but that turned out to be an advantage. I came to the page the way a confused visitor would, because that's basically what I was.
The solution: rebuild, don't scrap
I didn't throw away my first draft. I rebuilt it around what users actually came for.
I restructured the information hierarchy to surface the most-wanted info first:
Bio at the top: a personal, familiar entry point for everyone
Education next: instant credibility for the parents and researchers who came to scope
Expandable sections throughout: so the people who want awards or office hours can dig in, without burying everyone else in text
Built in Figma, ported to WordPress with Kadence Blocks, and held to WCAG 2.1 AA, I leveraged Berkeley's contrast checker constantly.
The hardest part: Figma → WordPress
What I'd do differently
Task time dropped from 130 seconds to 78, a 40% improvement
Post-project testing told the story. Across 100k annual visitors, that's over a thousand hours given back. My design is now the template for faculty pages across the department.
This project rewired how I design. I came in chasing a pretty UI; I left believing that empathy and structure must drive aesthetics. I lead with UX thinking now, test rigorously, and am not afraid to go back to the cutting board and understand that the UX process is not always linear.
Note: The Faculty Homepage is one of several other EECS pages I've redesigned and improved.
What this project taught me
What's next
