Context:
Role:
Duration:
Volunteer project at Hack4LA
UX/UI and content design lead
3 months, part time
I lead an initial UX/UI and content design phase for a site that collected several long reports and 70 documented practices from 60+ hours of interviews with civic good oriented tech volunteer groups. When I started, no design had been done, no information architecture existed, and no site content had been written.
Although this could almost be two sections of the site (or two sites), the information needs of both groups did in fact overlap.
We thus needed to balance presenting overall research with quickly finding documents. This affected the overall layouts and content structure. Within a given page, modals also offer more info about hero stats with links leading into analysis pages.
The research built on Code for America’s Brigade Organizer’s playbook, which was organized according to several topic areas that we believed would make sense for our audience. We couldn’t build a more dynamic filtering system for the resources available on the site so we adopted those topics as our index for the documents collected and research results.
Initial sketch of rough layouts and flow to visualize ideas for key stakeholders
Telling the story of the interview and analysis phases involved close collaboration with key stakeholders and a lot of digging through lists of old documents. We needed to distinguish the work and clarify the insights of multiple groups working in parallel on overlapping deliverables.
Rough architectural sketches like the one on the left helped us visualize the structure of the narrative we wanted to tell and low fidelity mockups like the ones on the right brought their details into sharper focus.
Working iteratively between design and content rather than doing one before the other gave us a real-time sense of when the story was getting too complex for visual communication techniques to hold together.
