BFI Idea Index Redesign PDF (a complete deliverable that includes personas, scenarios, content inventory, cardsorting results, comparative analysis, prototyping, and wireframes)
During the fall of 2010, my team of classmates in Information Architecture and I worked on the Buckminster Fuller Institute’s Challenge Website. The Institute hosts an annual design challenge. They needed help reorganizing the information about the challenge and were also interested in building up their Idea Index which contains all the submissions to the challenge with the hope that they will be implemented by the entrants or other interested parties.

Based on a session with the client, we developed personas for main user groups and scenarios that those personas might encounter. This process helped us in our design and prototyping phase to remind ourselves of what the users might be thinking and feeling during the scenarios. A content inventory showed that the website was very deep with content that could be combined into a simpler navigation scheme which would match users’ natural progression through the site. Our proposed navigation menu was developed by cardsorting, asking possible users to arrange content into groups and name them. In order to spark new ideas and look for a competitive advantage, we completed a comparative analysis of other websites that similarly strove to promote projects with social media elements. In the final stage of design, we built a paper prototype to test our proposed site. After a few changes, our new site was presented through a series of wireframes.

See an article on the Huffington Post about the Idea Index and our class research & design.