IdeaSquares – Website Design

The Brief

Redesign of a website aimed at creatives where they can promote their ideas/services/product(s).

Target audience: Creative people – people with ideas looking for funding and investors looking for those with ideas;
Measurable: Usability and understandability.

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Experience Mapping

The Outcome

Redesign of the website design and Information Architecture (IA) following relevant ISO guidelines, UX best practice, including Nielsen’s usability heuristics, interviewing people for usability/views/ideas as research, and A/B testing of designs
New Information Architecture (IA), including the removal of duplication in the menu
Removed the original small drop-down menu that had a huge number of subject categories, replacing it with a larger style surface area for the main menu to aid usability and ensured the menu avoided subject duplication. Used card sorting for user validation
Giving users feedback via the addition of the hover facility for the top menu bar
Ensuring consistency via replacing several colours with a single gold colour for the IdeaSquares
Added the square design feature to the main top menu in a colour different to those of the IdeaSquares on the page to make it easier for site users to find
Changed the Information Architecture, removing the icon squares ‘Recently viewed’, ‘Most Popular’, ‘Latest Squares’ to avoid duplication
Added a gold top to each Ideasquare to give balance
Hovering over any IdeaSquares/main menu to give users feedback (a box colour change from gold to one other colour e.g. purple)
Redesigned all 3 social media icons together with ‘blog’ with a link facility in a square directly under the top left home square to make it easier for site users to find
Redesigned the ‘login’ above the ’email/register/forget password’ so that these together formed a square in keeping with the square theme to make it easier for site users to find

The Challenge

To redesign the website design for usability alongside preconceptions
To accommodate quickly in the website design, the constantly changing form of this new start-up
A Responsive design, to take account of mobile and tablet usage

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Initial Sketches

Header and Footer Sketches

Main Menu Sketches

Outline of my work

I designed a new Information Architecture (IA) to:

Removed duplication of subject areas and to make it easier for site users to finding the relevant areas
Highlight the company vision/ethos of being aimed at creatives
Divided the Information Architecture (IA) into three areas, further to research: seeking creatives, seeking investment, seeking resources

Website design included:

Research involved heuristic evaluation, A/B testing and talking to/interviewing people (target group) to refine the original website, making it more usable, catering for the needs of the target group
Website page ‘mockups’ for the functional specifications