Information Architecture:

2008

iSchool Web Site Design Team

Working on a team consisting of fellow students, this project proposed a new website design for the School of Information. I participated in the project by designing several new interactions for the site as well as devising new and comprehensive changes to the site architecture. The team conducted weeks of user research to ground our design decisions. The proposed architecture is available online. My architecture addressed common problems such as content redundancy. The project itself is an example of my ability to collaboratively work with students and faculty.

The project required providing leadership within my peer group while cooperatively delineating direction and allocating responsibilities. Further, it required clarifying and synthesizing the research findings to create designs that addressed the site's problems. As de facto project manager, I helped the team deliver a fully formed, implementable website design as submitted to Dean Dillon and Associate Dean Rice-Lively in June of 2008.

Launch the Site

2007

Re-Design iSchool Career Services Web Site

For the Career Services Office Web Site my objective was to redesign http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/careers/ I chose this project because it has real-world complexity and had potential benefit to me and users. The visibility of the project would also inspire a lot of user feedback, from fellow iSchoolers. The site is already populated with content but is not optimally organized. The information for this site could be presented in more graphical and expressively. There are many pockets of pages where current users are stuck scrolling and scrolling through plain text. There was much improvement to be made to this site especially in regards to the architecture that supports the somewhat unwieldy and dull content. But, there are many existing policies that will stay in place thus minimizing the new improved feel which may affect qualitative post evaluations, and the perception of the site.

The primary objective was to re-design the information architecture of the site according to the needs of its users. The goal was of the user-interface design was to build a low-fi interface that supported the new architecture in order to improve user experience. The user interface here was a subordinate goal of the project so the changes to the look, feel and operation will be refined after validating the design of the information architecture through recorded user testing. Later, changes to the interface will be refined and tested according to the Keevil's heuristic test.

Launch the Site