Green U Sustainability

Team Members: Sanya Varma, Laurie Vuong, Sophie Toledano

The Green U Sustainability program at the University of Miami was redesigned to be more engaging and accessible. The project included a refreshed website and an interactive virtual tour of a certified green building, highlighting its sustainable features.

Problem

The Green U website needed a redesign to better reflect the University of Miami’s sustainability efforts. It was outdated, difficult to navigate, and lacked engaging tools to showcase resources. While other campus buildings had virtual tours, Centennial Village, a new green space, had none, limiting awareness of UM’s latest sustainability achievements.

Objectives

Improve usability and intuitive navigation

Increase engagement through virtual tour

Establish visual hierarchy

Refresh and modernize visual design

Target Audience

University of Miami students
Faculty and researchers
Campus visitors
Environmental advocates
Green U staff and collaborators

Role in the Team

UX and visual design
Research
Information architecture
Interactive prototype development

Research

During the discovery and research phase, we began by auditing the existing Green U site to evaluate its structure, visual language, and usability. We identified key user groups—such as students, faculty, and sustainability advocates—and pinpointed major pain points including outdated content and unclear navigation. A competitive analysis of similar sustainability sites from institutions like FIU and UPenn provided valuable insights. Building on these findings, the strategy and planning phase focused on reorganizing the site’s content for clarity, defining user goals and intuitive navigation flows, and crafting a fresh visual direction that aligns with the University of Miami’s brand identity.

Challenges Faced and Overcome

One of the main challenges we faced was the original site’s overwhelming amount of content and visual clutter, which made it hard to navigate. We also had to ensure the redesigned site and virtual tour worked smoothly across devices. Features like the LEED building tab system and the Centennial Village tour layout didn’t translate well to mobile, affecting usability.

To address this, we audited the site to identify what needed improvement and reorganized the content for better clarity and flow. We adapted the LEED tab system into a vertical dropdown for mobile and streamlined the virtual tour by making the green menu transparent and resizing the floor navigation. These changes helped create a cleaner, more user-friendly experience on all screen sizes.

Website Redesign Lo-Fi Wireframes

Virtual Tour Lo-Fi Wireframes

colors

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F47321

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FFFFFF

000000

Typography

Icons

Typography & icons

Website Redesign Final Prototype

Virtual Tour Final Prototypes

Conclusion

The Green U Redesign and Virtual Tour resulted in a more modern, organized, and user-friendly website that better represents the University of Miami’s sustainability efforts. The addition of the Centennial Village virtual tour filled a major gap in showcasing the campus’s newest green space. With improved navigation, mobile responsiveness, and a stronger visual identity, the redesigned site now serves as a more effective platform for engaging students, faculty, and visitors.

Reflection

This project taught me the value of thoughtful content organization and user-centered design. Over the past few months, we worked consistently to transform the Green U website from a cluttered, outdated platform into a modern, engaging, and functional experience. It was rewarding to see how much the site improved from our initial audit to the final version, and how each design decision made a real impact in creating a cleaner, more effective interface.

Throughout the process, we focused on thinking from the user’s perspective—how someone would navigate the site, what they’d be looking for, and how to make that experience as simple and seamless as possible. Every design choice, from reorganizing content to redesigning navigation, aimed to improve clarity and accessibility. We were especially mindful of mobile users, ensuring the site would work smoothly across all devices without losing key features or aesthetic consistency.

Seeing the project evolve over time helped me realize the importance of patience, collaboration, and iteration. It took multiple rounds of testing and feedback to refine the user flow and layout, but each step brought us closer to a more thoughtful final product. This experience not only sharpened my technical and design skills, but also deepened my understanding of how impactful good UX can be in telling a story—in this case, one about sustainability and innovation on campus.