Sorenson Center Website

The Sorenson Legacy Foundation Center for Clinical Excellence was one of my ongoing projects while working for Utah State University. This center is a medical facility where clinicians meet with patients to help improve their health. At the same time they provide university students opportunities to learn in their field with real-life situations. My role with this facility included creating graphics and printed design for raising money for the building, managing the TV advertisement screens, and designing, developing, and maintaining the website.

As I began my job with the university, the Sorenson Center was really just in a planning phase. The university had met with architects and created plans and renderings, but the building was still a ways out from being built. During this time I worked with the development office to create brochures, flyers, and other materials that they could take for their efforts to raise funds for the building.

As time went on and the center was built and completed there was a need for more cohesive branding. This was a collaborative project between me, the Sorenson Center administrators, and the university trademark and licensing team. We were able to pull some design elements from the physical building and create a design style guide for the center’s content while aligning it to the university branding guide.

My favorite project to work on was the website. We had a unique opportunity to create a website for the center which would be focused on clients within the community, where other websites were typically geared toward education. The one thing I was especially proud of with this project was using Sketch to design out the website before building it. At that time, this was not a common practice at the university. Most developers would just go straight to coding a website based off of information from a word document.

Because of this new (to Utah State University) strategy I was asked to present at a web conference that the university put on for all of the university website managers and developers. My presentation titled “Designing Audience-Focused Websites” shared my process on how I designed and developed the website, and encouraged others to follow a similar path. After the presentation I was also given the opportunity to run a workshop on designing websites with the university template, and how to convert those designs into a clickable prototype.

Working with the Sorenson Center has always been one of my favorite parts of working with Utah State University. The things mentioned here is only a small part of the things I did to enhance the communication and design of the center. There were a lot of wonderful learning experiences that have helped shape me into the user experience engineer that I am today.

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