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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:
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Okay, right: I didn’t really solve that problem. But I did lead a project a few years ago at Dynamic Diagrams, defining the information architecture for a new website for the Forum for Global Health Protection (now Emerging Health Threats).
The analysis phase included user interviews with doctors, researchers, and other stakeholders. One thing most interviews had in common was how they thought about the knowledge: by named threat, by health field, or by global region. We made sure to incorporate a tagging system in the CMS and highlighted those facets in search, including combined searches.
To explain the site’s architecture, we created a diagram. The big yellow-orange cube in the diagram represents the knowledge facets and how users can access knowledge by single or combined facets, in 3D: by layers, rows, or single cubes.
BIG NOTE OF CREDIT: Kim Looney of Dynamic Diagrams did the stunning visual design. My role was to define the requirements, define the architecture, and manage the project. Second note: It’s a large PNG file and may take a few seconds to load.
Click to see the detailed view. It may take a few seconds to load.
The purpose of the site is to share information about emerging health threats from pathogens, chemicals, and the environments (natural and human). That’s what the site’s architecture is doing.
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