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| View the site |
SLAC
Environment, Safety, & Health
 Compare
the Environment, Safety, & Health home page before and after the redesign.
To
see the complete design, contact
me for a demo of the prototype. |
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| Background |
Stanford Linear Accelerator's Environment, Safety, and Health
site suffered from years of neglect — and a lack of any comprehensive information
design to give its content coherence and consistency. Information was organized
by owner rather than by topic — and scattered in little fiefdoms throughout
the site. Users needed formidable persistence to find what they were looking
for. |
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| The Project |
Conducted user interviews.
I first interviewed a group of typical users to find out what tasks they
most often went to the site to do and what obstacles got in their way. Everybody
did roughly the same handful of tasks, and everybody had the same complaints:
the information they needed was scattered, the pages were cluttered and
poorly organized, the structure of the site and the navigation scheme were
illogical, the terminology was confusing. |
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Identified top issues. Created
personas and scenarios. I distilled my findings into a short list
of the top issues that we needed to focus on. I also created a persona
(PDF, 100k) — an archetypal user — so we had a clear picture
of whom we were designing the site for. (The persona also helped remind
everyone that the site had to work for the users, not just satisfy the stakeholders.)
I distilled the typical tasks the users were trying to accomplish into the
essential use-case scenarios
(PDF, 125k). |
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Conducted a card sorting exercise.
I next did a card-sorting exercise with another group of typical users to
gather data to resolve the site structure and terminology issues. |
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Created wireframes. Built and
user-tested a prototype. I then built a working prototype that embodied
a user-centered organization and navigation scheme, terminology that made
sense to users, and page designs that were clean and well-organized. I tested
the prototype with another group of typical users to see if they could complete
the scenarios we’d defined earlier. The time to complete the most
important of the tasks dropped from 25 minutes on the existing site to an
average of a couple of minutes in the prototype. |
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Developed a wireframe guide.
I fully documented the prototype and information design in a wireframe guide. |
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(Excerpt: home
page, PDF, 225k) |
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The guide made it possible for the SLAC Web team both to
build the site and to understand the principles behind the information design
so they could maintain it in the future. |
