Erica Sullivan: Design Researcher

The first project in Design Research is Gallery Website. In this project, the assignment is to take the website of a regional gallery or museum and

A.) audit the existing website

B.) design information architecture for a new, refocused website

This week was week 3 of working on part A, and week 1 of working on part B. This post contains revised versions of all the part A stuff (personas/user scenarios, survey questionnaires, and the existing structural diagram).

Revised persona/user scenario 1:
Also available in PDF.

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The first project in Design Research is Gallery Website. In this project, the assignment is to take the website of a regional gallery or museum and

A.) audit the existing website

B.) design information architecture for a new, refocused website

This week was week 2 of working on part A.

In order to diagnose problems with the structure of the site, it’s necessary to first map out that structure. This is my first draft of the site structure diagram.

If you want to look closer, this file is also available in a full-size PDF.

Feedback on the diagram was pretty positive.

To do:
- finish color-coding
- standardize box widths
- correct mistakes in sub-page names
- redesign “layer indicators” (gray boxes)
- note inconsistences in top navigation bar
- add label

The first project in Design Research is Gallery Website. In this project, the assignment is to take the website of a regional gallery or museum and

A.) audit the existing website

B.) design information architecture for a new, refocused website

This week was week 1 of working on part A.

I chose the Old State House Museum, a small museum in downtown Boston. It’s a beautiful historical building dating to 1713, and they have a lot of cool stuff (like the earliest example of a striped American flag, one of John Hancock’s suits, a musket from the site of the Boston Massacre) and yet I’d never really heard that it was a museum, much less been there before.

This week we had to come up with personas (fictional users, or in this case, visitors to the museum and its website), user scenarios (what the personas would do during a visit) and questionnaires (evaluations of the existing website). I also took a bunch of photos of the museum, which turned out to be really interesting. There aren’t too many exhibits, and you can see it all in under an hour.

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