This team User Experience design project was the final for my Interfaces to Information Systems class at GSLIS. It was done in partnership with WILL AM/FM/TV, the local NPR and PBS affiliate.
Our group employed user testing and heuristic analysis to take a first-pass look at the WILL website. Then we each did a rough redesign based on those results, and combined them into a rather patchwork first redesign draft. This draft was submitted for critical feedback from the rest of the class, and a meeting was scheduled with the WILL design team in which we learned about the organizational and fiscal constraints on their design process and had an opportunity to review recent analytics data for key sections of the site.
We incorporated this feedback and data into a second iteration in which we each specialized on a specific piece of the larger site. I chose the overall Information Architecture, with a specific focus on reworking the menu system. Other members focused on social media integration, the article view and associated content strategy, and the search interface. Coming together to combine these separate elements made the decisions for the second iteration of the main page design much simpler. The third and final iteration incorporated another round of peer feedback from the class, and generally polished and tweaked our previous work and took it from the wireframe stage to a more high resolution and fully fleshed out product.
I had already done extensive UX and front end development as an individual consultant before, but this project gave me a much better sense of how this work is done in a team setting and for larger clients and projects. This course and project helped to formalize and contextualize my knowledge of UX practices and techniques, and gave me a much firmer foundation for my work going forward.