As the university consolidates its user experience design strategy, I was tasked to research and design a unified user-interface for the Global Network University initiative. The plan is to develop and provide modular interfaces consistent across all products under the nyu.edu domain. Simultaneously, the design affords schools some creative variation to produce visual personality. To solve this, I arrived with dual but hierarchical navigation, one for the university, global, and another for the school, local.
Following the design requirement of global and local navigation, we investigated several ideas outside the restrictions of time and development resources. We narrowed our concepts down to three core ideas around language orientation: English, simplified Chinese, and Arabic. The three spoken languages in our international campus of New York, Shanghai, and Abu Dhabi. The school’s local language can define the ideal page layout. Together the navigation can also switch between left-to-right or right-to-left writing directions—based on the local language.
The diagram below illustrates the different navigation properties of the web application from the local navigation available front and center. To the global navigation accessible with one click from anywhere on the web app
The mobile app provides a modular user interface that can accommodate linguistic diversity from English and Arabic to simplified Chinese. The navigation presents hierarchical design options for the different needs of colleges and programs in the University.
