TACO Desk
This case study outlines the transformation of the website for Texas Atomic Nuclear Outreach, a subset of the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering's Nuclear and Radiation engineering program.
Date
May — June 2025
Role
Sole Designer and Developer (under the guidance of Dani Zigon)
Company
Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering
Wait, so what is TACO Desk?
The Texas Atomic Community Outreach (TACO) Desk is a web-hosted help desk intended for those without a background in Nuclear energy to have an accessible, casual point of contact with employees of the University of Texas’ Department of Nuclear and Chemical Engineering. Through a “no stupid questions” approach, TACO Desk hopes to bring understanding to upcoming Nuclear energy projects and to make educational resources by the University of Texas publicly accessible.
Process
I started by mapping out pain points and prototyping solutions in Figma. My goals were to:
Establish a clear call to action to guide users from the first click
Incorporate TACO branding into the design for trust and recognition (this included creating TACO oriented assets in addition to the existing UT Cockrell School of Engineering brand book)
Simplify the information hierarchy so users could quickly understand the site’s purpose
Reframe nuclear research as approachable and accessible through visuals and language
As I began the visual design and storytelling process, I consistently sent check-ins and plans to my boss. Logo sketches, user zones and flows.
Through extensive sketching, ideation, and digital iterations, I designed 3 key, establishing new details not previously included:
Scrolling question cards in the header
Adds visual interest while quickly establishing the kind of questions that the user may ask
Wonder/Ask/Resolve
A snappy way to further establish the user’s process for interaction
Moving the “Ask a question button” from the header to the hero section
The simplest and most effective change. This button is the first clickable asset that the user sees— how it should be!
Implementation
Once we got to a point where I had designed an approved layout, I began implementation so that it could exist as a live website.
Because the site lived on Zendesk, there were technical constraints. How do you make a rigid platform feel like a tailored experience? Some more complex and layered aspects of my design (the scrolling question cards in the header) required workarounds. Instead of building from scratch, I developed a custom Zendesk theme using HTML, CSS, Handlebars, and JavaScript. As I was new to Zendesk’s framework, I leaned on rapid prototyping and AI-assisted coding to problem-solve within platform limitations. This allowed me to transform a generic template into a site that looked and felt like a standalone product without altering how our Nuclear team interacts with user queries.