Disassembled Rubik

I am now actively engaged in redesigning a website for a government entity that in its current state is nothing short of a Rubik’s Cube. I am now in process of breaking the cube apart in order to put it back together again. Here is an outline of my plan to improve the website user experience:

Principles Based Audit – “Walk” through the existing website and identify interaction issues by qualifying them against a list of design principles. The design principles are adapted from Cooper’s book “About Face 3″.

Personas – Idenitify who the target audience is and what activities they are engaged in. Identify each persona’s motivations and intent; identify value(s) that can improve user interaction with the website.

Information architecture – Taxonomies & Vocabularies. Discover, break, and redesign how the content is organized by leveraging user goals and stories.

Stories - Interaction narratives that illustrate how a persona uses the application to perform an action.

Principles Influenced Changes – UI sketches, paper prototypes, wireframe clickthroughs.

Brand Words – Leaning towards “Mature”, “Secure”, “Stable”.

How do we want the audience to feel? – “Supported”, “Guided”, “Understood”.

Visual Language – Comps (a.k.a., mockups)

Integrate Visual Design with New Interaction – High-fidelity comps of primary and secondary layouts and component interactions.

Integrate New Interaction with Technology – Support the Developers as they hook it all in.

Wash, Rinse, Repeat – Continuously improve.

Reactable: tangible multi-touch interface

“At the seashore, between the land of atoms and the sea of bits, we are now facing the challenge of reconciling our dual citizenship in the physical and digital worlds. Our windows to the digital world have been confined to flat rectangular screens and pixels, or ‘painted bits.’ While our visual senses are steeped in the sea of digital information, our bodies remain in the physical world. The vision of Tangible Bits is to provide seamless coupling between these two very different worlds of bits and atoms.” — Hiroshi Ishii

Source: Tangible Bits by Howard Rheingold