NYU Tandon established a PhD Hub Office in May, 2022 to connect its PhD students, solve their problems, and assist in their professional development. As the part-time web developer and designer, my responsibility is to integrate existing resources into a supportive website, assist the manager in identifying students' need, and transfer them to website content.
This is an on-going project, and is expected to be done by March, 2022. So far, I've created a fully functional website on my personal server. We are waiting for more content to populate the website. Once everything is ready, the website will be transferred to the official NYU server for public use.
To create the PhD Hub website, I first referenced the NYU Tandon Website and NYU Tandon style guide to make sure the website I created is consistent with the style of NYU Tandon. Before the PhD Hub, Tandon already offers some resources to the PhD students, they are hosted on separate websites: Fellowship Opportunities and Professional Development. My supervisor wants me to combine the two, and also add some other resources.
Based on our discussion, I created an original site map with lucid hart that creates a hierarchy of all the webpages. In the map, we have one homepage (under development), seperate tabs for the Fellowship Opportunities and Professional Development, a tab for other resources, a contact page.
The current homepage is still under development. It has the basic layout and the welcoming text, but the banner image needs to be changed, and the action items need to be added. I keep the action items blank intentionally. This PhD Hub website contains many pages and I don't want to list everything on the homepage, which could be overwhelming. Therefore, we would have user testing shortly to gather insights for which elements deverse most attention and should be put on the frontpage.
The navigation bar is based on the NYU Tandon website style. It's developed based on a collapsible menu. However, one shortage of the NYU tandon website navigation bar is that users toggle the sub menu on and off by clicking on the main tabs, so there's no landing paging for each overarching tabs.
So I moved forward a step with the navigation bar of the PhD Hub Website: Users toggle on and off the sub menu by hovering over it, and when they click on the tab, they will be navigated to the corresponding landing page. This feature is better because some sub menus have many tabs, it could be overwhelming for users to go through all the links in a sub menu.
For the navigation bar of the PhD Hub, the left side "PHD HUB" Links to the homepage of this website, the right side NYU Tandon Logo links to the NYU Tandon main page. The texts on the NYU Tandon Navigation bar is all uppercased, but I changed the texts to capitalized on the PhD Hub navigation bar to increase accessibility.
*Tab names and categorizations are not final
Another big change I made is add a fixed-position sidebar to some sub pages, which always appear in the window frame. One of the issues I identified with the fellowship is the dropdown menu for the "Graduate Research Fellowship Program" of the Fellowship Opportunities website: It has too many items.
To reduce the items, I combined several items based on their content, and connect these subpages with a fixed sidebar. The style of the sidebar is based on the subpages of NYU Tandon websites.
The fixed-position sidebar contains two parts, "On the Page" links to different sections on the current page; "Related Links" links to other sub pages. The "Related Links" is also located at the end of the page for users to check out when they finish reading the page.
The sidebar of the NYU Tandon Website will disappear in the mobile view. In the PhD Hub website. But I think the sidebar can make the experience more efficient by allowing people jump to different sections, so I make it visible also in mobile view, and users can choose to toggle it on and off.
Once I've finished the functional website on my personal server and integrated all existing resources, we moved forward to identify other opportunities that could assist the PhD students. To better understand students' need and struggles, me and another graduate student assisted the PhD Hub Manager Jamie in conducting 2 student Focus Group Sessions, each lasted 1 hour, and contained 4 PhD students from different department of Tandon.
During the sessions, we asked questions regarding 4 aspects:
Based on their feedback, we concluded that some students are struggling with the work/life balance, and they are concerned about their financial status, including stipend and funding opportunities.
Following the focus groups, Jamie and I had another Lunch and Learn session with administratives at Tandon who deal with PhD students. During the meeting, we reported the findings from the focus groups, and asked for their thoughts. Combining their suggestions and students' ideas, we created a list of action items, the ones for the PhD website are:
To ensure we have all the supportive information for the PhD students at Tandon and to better structure the information. I'm working on a benchmarking study to see what information are provided on other institutes websites. The three institutions/schools I'm analyzing are Columbia Office of Postdoctoral Affairs, Brown Postdoctoral Affairs, and Steinhardt Doctoral Studies.
Once the website is 90% ready, I plan to do a user testing for students' feedback and further improve the website.
So far, my outcome is a fully function PhD Hub Website. I created from scratch with HTML/CSS, and Javascript. My next step is to do benchmarking, and a user testing to further improve it.
This is a work still under development and is expected in February 2023. During the process, my understanding and skills grow in:
