Experience Type, UX

Work in your assigned team to learn about your assigned website and redesign their digital experience, taking a "type first" approach when it comes to the look and feel, and overall design.

This project is worth 100 points in all, and has multiple parts. 

I. Preliminary Design Research

• Absorb the content: get to know your assigned client; conduct field research; conduct competitive research; interview students, readers, experts, users
• Analyze the content: understand what's important, know the site hierarchy and architecture, and understand use cases
• Define personas: identify no less than 4 personas who currently use the site, with 1 of those personas being new users you hope to win

Use class time on Feb. 20th to work in teams to understand the site content, site's purpose, and overall brand identity. Students will have to present their findings to the class on Feb. 25th, incorporating any visual aids into a PDF.

Goals for Feb. 25th Presentation

• general content audit: clearly and concisely show us the site's architecture, hierarchy; use a diagram to do so
• use cases: present no less than 10 use cases, showing how the site gets used for content creation/editing/push/output and also how a user can absorb/read/input/digest that content (see your notes from our Feb. 18 discussion); How can role-playing help you define these things?
• personas: show no less than 4 personas who currently use the site, with 1 of those personas being new users you hope to win
• challenges: state any technical challenges as they currently exist, specifically challenges that are part of the site content, how users interact with the content, or "bandwidth" challenges that might exist (see reading placed on Turnstile_2 for further information)
• look and layout: show us how the site is currently designed, and propose (if needed) a new layout, new grid, new schema—if you redesign it, you must have a good reason for doing so—and you will need to show all of the following, including but not limited to mobile, tablet, laptop, desktop, smart-screen such as a teacher's widescreen smartboard
• use design research methods for your work above, see this textbook
• format your presentation's visual aids as a PDF, playable on our Rutledge 221 iMac

Research Worth 30:

• 10 inclusion of all required content
• 10 craft, composition of layout(s)
• 5 research, critical thinking employed
• 5 demonstration of design research methods  

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II. Information Architecture & Visual Design due Wednesday February 27th

• newly created wordmark, lettermark, or logo, a rebranding
• mobile web layouts
• desktop web layouts
• app design
• use of site via smartclassroom display, television (for Wikipedia)
• use of site via sales platform, search platform, or other portal for push (for Craigslist)
• search, in other words, how you can integrate your brand's product comfortably and with "low friction" into search abilities
• +innovation, something unique your team designed for the brand that is on-brand, a new and unique touchpoint
• submit final design work as PDF files

Tools: Students do not have to code/program their site, but rather, you are designing for the front-end, and may use Illustrator, InDesign, Sketch, or Adobe XD. Further reading here:

1. Sketch
2. Adobe XD 
3. Adobe XD (more)
4. see also, "_software and tools" links in our Project 3 folder on Turnstile_2

Final Design Due Feb. 27th, Worth 70 points: shared work, shared client, shared grade… in other words, each member of Craigslist gets the same grade and each member of Wikipedia gets their own grade for their work

• 40 design, layout, typographic sensibilities, use of the grid, precision, appropriateness of typography used, readability
• 20 function, appropriateness
• 10 professionalism, portfolio-worthiness