19:
At my current employer, we’re undergoing a massive re-work of our main site. Mostly backend changes, but I was given the opportunity to refresh the UI as I brought the HTML and CSS more inline with web standards. On the major customer form page, we have an email address field. While interviewing our Customer Care department, I found out that the largest number of calls they receive are for people who never received their confirmations because they mistyped their email addresses.
My immediate thought was to add a secondary email address field. It’s what you see in most cases. Our development group complained and rightly so that it’s never fun entering the same information twice and that at least some number of users just copy and paste the address anyway.
After thinking some more, I came up with what I hope is a more elegant solution. After the user enters his or her email address, a message appears in red repeating the user’s email address:
The solution depends on JavaScript, using the onblur event. For our site’s users, less than 5% have JavaScript disabled. One thing I like, though it’s subtle, is that the message explains why the user should review what they entered; they won’t receive their confirmation if it’s wrong.
07:
A few years ago, I redesigned several calendar interfaces for the Boston University community of more than 40,000 people. It was a good challenge, given the large audience and the range of user profiles. The main objective was to improve the user experience, something there wasn’t time for in the first release. My project roles included user interface designer and project manager.
Some improvements I designed included
- fewer fields on event displays and submission forms
- more logical field groupings and group headings
- client-side dynamic elements, showing what’s needed only when it’s needed
- simpler and more scannable search results
Click any of the thumbnails below to view them full size, or you can peruse (“peruse”!) the Calendar 1.1 project site on the BU Web.
31:
When I worked as an information architect at Dynamic Diagrams, I got the chance to contribute wireframes for a complete redesign of the University of St. Andrews website. The project was interesting because the project lead, Mac Mcburney, had architected the site with a CMS backend that single-sourced certain content across user groups (the standard university constituencies: students (current and perspective), alumni, parents, faculty, staff). This meant that the information groupings and layout for the same content chunks had to work across user groups, as varied as they were.
Our work at the project ended at requirements and wireframes, along with some visual design. It was interesting to see how close the final pages were, after more thorough visual design stages and implementation, to the wireframes. The site has been out a few years now and the pages are still close to the originals. That’s satisfying.
Click the thumbnails to view a PDF file of some of the wireframes I created:
rss feed
