User Personas
As is the case with many projects, I first had my point of contact on the client side pull together a core testing group made up of different types of stakeholders. I conducted a structured interview with each of the core testers, then synthesized those initial interviews into user personas, one of which is on right/below.
Redesign Approach
It quickly became clear through the interviews that the most critical change to the website design should be how the project information was displayed. The old site spoke to when AgResults was still designing its model, and so information was static and siloed into its high-level concepts. The new site needed to highlight project information, which is now the crux of the work. I thus decided the new website would center around project pages, and had my core testers do an open card sort on Optimal Workshop to help me understand what the project pages needed to contain.
The dendogram view helped me understand groups of words (sections) the testers thought should be included in a project page. The similarity matrix helped me understand how the client should frame concepts when building out their content for the project pages. For example, the dendogram informed my decision to center each project page around a “Learning Journey” that includes the prize design and its results. The similarity matrix told me that the results section should associate the concepts of sustainability and resiliency.
Taking the design research findings and the strict color palette of AgResults, I then designed a high-fidelity prototype to which I had the client react. Simultaneously, I provided a few sample Joomla* templates on which to build the new site. We refined the prototype several times to match the elements of the templates the client liked the most.
*Joomla was the preferred CMS of the client.
Data Visualizations
Concurrent to the website, I led visualization development for 12 infographics AgResults wished to display on the new site. To the left/above is a infographic I conceptualized and designed to reflect the process of elimination AgResults undergoes to choose concepts to validate in their projects.
New Site Launch
Working with a team of 3 developers, in November 2018, we successfully launched the new site, complete with the new infographics. Please visit https://agresults.org to see our work and read more about AgResults.
