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Future of Hospitality Work Website

During my undergraduate research internship with Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, the interscholastic NSF-funded Future of Hospitality Work research team, challenged me to build a website in one week to showcase their team's work.

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User Requirements

After meeting with the research team's members and analyzing best practices for research websites at other prominent HCI research universities, I was able to define the following set of user requirements:

• Homepage & Mission – Clearly communicate the team's purpose with concise text and visuals.
• Team Profiles – Include bios, headshots, affiliations, and personal contact information for each team member.
• Publications & Press – Showcase academic papers and media coverage with titles and links to full articles or downloads.
• Institutional Collaboration – Highlight partner universities and organizations with logos, descriptions, and links.
• Navigation & Usability – Ensure an intuitive structure with separate sections for About, Publications, Press, Team, and a placeholder for a survey to be added later.
• Accessibility & Readability – Follow WCAG guidelines (e.g. maintain clear typography, alt text, high-contrast design) and ensure compatibility with screen-readers.
• Links & Downloads – Provide access to external sources and downloadable PDFs. Open links in a new tab.
• Visual Design & Branding – Maintain a professional, cohesive design optimized for desktop and mobile.

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Design & Development

An initial round of interface design and user testing revealed that:

1. Divinding the site's content into separate pages would be useful to prevent excessive scrolling and user frustration.
2. The team would not have a member available to maintain an updated News section.
3. The branding felt true to the team's purpose, but the variable color-blocking between page sections was impairing focus and readability.
4. The embedded PDF file viewer for the team's publications prevented tracking certain analytics such as number of file views and downloads—information actively available through the external site originally hosting the publications.

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Key Takeaways

• Just because a design choice aligns with industry UX standards doesn’t mean it’s the best fit for a specific user base.
• Failing fast at design iterations is ideal when working within expedited timeline.
• Balancing aesthetics and functionality is crucial—design elements should enhance usability rather than distract from content.