New WPI.edu Design System

Over the last year, Marketing Communications has been performing several analyses of our current website including information architecture, user experience, accessibility, and readability as well as conducting research of top competitor websites within our marketplace. As a result of these analyses, we have designed and developed a stronger and more consistent design system for the website interface to meet the needs of both site visitors and campus partners as we continually strive to improve and iterate upon our Drupal framework.

Over the coming weeks and months, you will see these new design changes rolled out progressively in phases. Phase 1 began to launch on the website after the break, and includes new formatting for main images, breadcrumbs (the text links found on the top of the page), page titles, buttons, and highlight boxes, as well as other commonly used widgets (the different elements used to display web content). We are soon embarking on Phase 2 of less common widgets in order to unify our new design system across the site interface, and hope to complete this project by the Summer of 2020.

As we launch this new design system, you may see issues with formatting or alignment. If so, please complete this brief form with a link to the page and a description of the issue. Please submit one form per issue. We will be happy to add it to our list of quality assurance items.