Thesis Project: Redesigning Telkom University Website for Better User Experience
Published Thursday, January 22, 2026—3 minutes read
Prospective applicants were struggling to navigate our university website, and I wanted to understand why finding basic information had become so difficult.
Have you ever visited a university website and felt completely lost trying to find basic information? I noticed this problem at our university. Students and prospective applicants were struggling to navigate the website just to find the information they needed to make important academic decisions.
While I was working on my own bachelor’s thesis, I realized that the Telkom University website had some serious usability issues. I turned this frustrating experience into a research project, aiming to uncover exactly what was going wrong and how to build a better digital experience for everyone.
Spotting the Problem
Telkom University had a big vision to become a world-class university. Because of this goal, its digital presence also needed to reflect that ambition through a better user experience. But when I looked closely, the user interface and user experience were lacking, especially on the mobile version.
I dug into the details and found several major headaches for users :
- The website pages took far longer to load than users expected
- The visual design was inconsistent
- The color choices felt unharmonious
- Information was poorly grouped, making it confusing for visitors
- The typography and illustrations lacked visual consistency
From Research to Redesign
To understand how these issues could be addressed, I started with some groundwork. I interviewed a UI/UX expert to get professional insights and reviewed several university websites to understand how they approached navigation, content organization, and visual design more effectively.
I then distributed online questionnaires to 100 high school students in Bandung because they were the primary audience seeking university information online. Their responses helped identify the information they considered most important when exploring potential universities. The results showed that study programs, tuition fees, and registration details were among the information they cared about most.
With those findings as a foundation, I started the redesign. I applied a flat design approach to create a cleaner and more modern interface, while making the website fully responsive across desktops, tablets, and smartphones. I also simplified the information grouping to improve readability and used the university’s official visual identity to keep the redesign consistent with the existing brand.
Once the prototype was ready, I tested it with the same target audience. Every participant reported higher satisfaction with the redesigned website than with the previous version, giving me direct evidence that the changes had addressed the experience problems identified earlier. The project showed me how even a focused study with a specific audience can turn a frustrating interface into something that is easier to understand and use.
Although publication was not a degree requirement, I chose to turn the project into a journal paper. It allowed me to document the research beyond the thesis itself and gave me my first opportunity to experience the process of sharing academic work with a broader audience.