Comic Study Society (Redesign)
About
As a part of a course I took in Fall'16, I was required to redesign the comic study society(CSS) website in a team of three. The CSS website was not in a very good shape when we first came across it. There were several problems with the site which needed to be fixed as soon as possible. Prioritizing which problems should we fix first became a real problem. In the end, we did identify key areas of the site which a potential user might use more and decided to proceed from there. We also conducted individual user studies and created prototypes for this site which was a great learning experience.
Details about this project can be found at CSS Redesign site.
Softwares: Balasmiq, Sketch, UXpin, Invision, Axure.
My Process
I follow the Design Thinking process suggested by IDEO. I divide my work into three stages:
IDEO Design process
Inspiration
Since, this was the first time I was working on a redesign assignment, I had not yet picked up how to perform Cognitive walkthroughs. So, I performed a User Study on my roommate in the study room of my apartment along with a holistic analysis of the site which I performed on my own. This was my first formal experience of performing a User Study, but I can say that it went pretty well. I learned lots of things that were wrong with the website and the annoyance level of my roommate helped me in identifying how to fix it.
Consent form that I used
User Study in action
Ideation
For the Ideation phase, I created plenty of prototypes that could solve the problems of the CSS site. The original CSS site looked something like this:
A Glorious mess
The task was to make this website more usable. The prototypes that I created for this redesign can be found below:
Iteration 1
Iteration 2
Iteration 3
The rationale behind these iterations and why they were rejected can be found over here.
Implementation
After much deliberations and fiddling with the website, we came up with this final design. The final prototype looked as shown in the images below
Final Design (Home page)
New About us Design
Resources page
Interesting experiences
The most challenging part of this project was fixing a website that was in a terrible condition. Prioritizing what needed to be fixed first was difficult. Also, since it was a team project, coming to a common conclusion of what the final design looked like was particularly challenging. But, overall this went very well.