Introduction
As any prolfic collector knows, there's a point at which your things begin to get lost in the clutter. World Information Architecture Day (WIAD) is an yearly celebration of Information Architecture, and accordingly has an extensive amount of collected materials. As part of the LA DIA team, I designed a website to unify and display previous years' content.
Discovery
Over the course of 6 months, I met remotely with 8 other designers to breathe life into our new site. Our prime objective
was to figure out the best way to sort and present different topics while maintaining
the functionality of the location-specific event pages.
To get a rough sense of what we needed to accomplish, we held sketching sprints
to generate ideas for the homepage and voted on features, subsequently
assigning specific features to individual designers.
I was responsible for the talk pages for
displaying specific talks and topics.
Do your homework!
There are many awesome platforms for viewing content online: Youtube,
Vimeo, Lynda, and TED, to name a few. I wanted the WIAD experience to focus on education,
like Lynda and TED, and incorporate their best features.
Specifically, Lynda has a great scrolling transcript feature where the user can
click on individual sentences and the video will jump to match the transcript. I also
wanted to integrate a way to view the presentation deck simultaneously with the corresponding video.
Lynda Scrolling Transcript
I also like how TED has a Speaker subsection that has talks hosted by the same speaker, as well as related topics in the sidebar, making it incredibly easy to find interesting topics or drill down on specific categories.
Ted Author Navigation
Once I had decided on the most relevent features, I mocked up the designs as Sketch documents to send the developers as a guideline. Because of the tight timeline, we were only able to accomplish one iteration.
Final Thoughts and Products
Overall, the look of the website is clean and easily navigable. As with any project on a tight timetable, more time would have been wonderful to really push the pixels, but alas. Life.