case study: interaction design

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Client: Blue Mountain Center for Meditation

Project: Easwaran.org redesign project

Role: Business Analyst, Information Architect, Interaction Designer and de facto Project Manager

Situation:

The client had contacted me to revise the existing information architecture for their web site, including an ecommerce component. The existing IA revealed issues that would best be solved through a complete analysis and redesign of the site applying a full user experience perspective on their complete site

Tasks:

I needed to analyze how the site was currently performing, how the users were able to perform the tasks on the site. Additionally, I wanted to clarify the goals of the web site and how it operated as a marketing device as well as improve general interaction design on the site and unify the visual theme of the pages.

Actions:

Full user experience design deliverables were created to analyze, develop and support the new vision of the easwaran.org portal site. These deliverables included:

• Business Analysis and Strategy:
• business goals:
  • spreadhseet where strategic, organizational goals were tied to user goals
• business process maps and conceptual drawings:
  • analysis of content creation and delivery across multiple organizational departments, and how that effected Web site production
• user segmentation and persona creation:
  • analysis of potential users and their relationship to BMCM products as well as site analytics
• usability heuristic analysis:
  • basic heuristic analysis of existing GUI with suggestions for revision and better allocation of real estate, for quick UI related wins
• Information Architecture:
• content inventory:
  • catalogue of existing content and analysis that formed content strategy and recommendations
• sitemap:
  • taxonomy, including labelling, navigational scheme and headings/sections, and content types; sitemap also noted where new content creation was necessary, and advised where existing content needed to be revised
• Interaction Design:
• wireframes:
  • over 71 wireframes detailing a complete redesign of the existing site’s structure (IA), each page’s layout (visual and information design) and the functions and interactions on those pages (interaction design). Created 10 separate sets of wireframes which separated the content into unique sections. Each contained notations on the functional, creative and technical requirements of the page; basic elements of the page (including type of content, kind of item and description), as well as a legend, issues section, version control area, site flow and type of page.

A full suite of clear, easy to understand user experience deliverables which allow the BMCM to develop a more usable web site. All wireframes had annotations explaining the design decisions, including the functions and interactions of my proposed designs. In this way, new team members (like developers who had no background or context about the project) could quickly get up to speed with the project.

Results:

The client had the tools they needed to develop their site, which was subsequently launched with a freshly redesigned experience.