Earth + Space
Digital Platform Redesign

Role

Creative Direction

UX / UI Design

Digital Branding & Visual Identity

As the Senior UX/UI Designer for Icreon, I was the sole member of the creative team and was responsible for every aspect of the project. I interfaced with clients and internal stakeholders, led workshops and designed and implemented the UX for this project as well as the creative and visual direction.

Research + Discovery

Business Deep Dive

Through direct and indirect research we immerse ourselves in the client’s business – their current content, visual language, tone and voice, business processes, and goals. We explore their audience – current as well as aspirational, and develop comprehensive personas as guidelines.

Client Workshops + Identifying Individual Audiences

I organized and ran multiple client workshops with the team at AGU in order to hone in on the many varying audiences for their new platform – educators, students, research scientists, and several others!

These workshops were incredibly helpful – not only giving me and the rest of the Icreon team unique insights into the needs of our client, but allowing for us to build trust and engagement with the wide range of people involved on the client side.

AGU's annual conference – a *huge* event held over multiple days for people across the earth + space sciences and from across the world. The specific needs of this conference, alongside the day-to-day needs of the AGU platform, would need to be integrated.

Balancing User Needs + Business Goals

Personas are crafted through individual users’ goals and needs, but also the circumstances in which they are engaging with the client’s business – are they relaxed and at home? Traveling? Working? Context and circumstance often drive the most interesting decisions, and only through our careful exploration can we understand and direct those choices. Through mapping this research of business goals and users’ needs, we can identify current pain points and suggest areas of opportunity.

Users’ needs support the shaping and optimization of the content organization and ultimate Information Architecture, which in turn helps us map their journeys and outline specific user flows. By crafting these narratives and pathways – creating the experiences we want for people in accomplishing their goals – and with all our accumulated data informing our decisions and direction, I moved into the next phase of the design process.

3 Options for Visual Identity

After gathering + prioritizing the business goals and user needs, and planning the basics of the new Information Architecture and framework for the new platform, I pulled together three design directions for our client to choose from.

Option One: Report

Taking pieces of inspiration from vintage scientific papers and confidential reports but bringing it into a bright and clear current feel with good use of bold imagery.

Option Two: Modern

Sparked by a subset of the client team who wanted to focus entirely on imparting information to the exclusion of "superfluous" imagery, this option takes inspiration from Brutalist design and scientific papers.

Option Three: Exploration + Discovery

A wild card in terms of UX, this option goes heavy on the client's wish to emphasize exploration and discovery on their site to mirror the scientific endeavors of their members.

Strategy & Design

Clarifying + Streamlining What Was Once An Archipelago Of Separate Sites

After compiling our research results and drafting our plans, I began sketching and wireframing, creating the UX structure based on the purpose and direction for each page, projected responsiveness and motion is designed, and interaction models mapped out.

Expandable + Modular Design for Sitecore

Flexible System for Growth

In the next phase of the design process, I further developed the designs for more nuanced visuals and motion design. As I designed out the platform, I crafted a visual language for the client’s digital presence, and developed a flexible design system of components and interaction models.

I designed for growth – with this toolkit and visual library, the digital product is infinitely scalable, adapting to fit new business directions and shifting goals.

Continuous Testing + Refining

We worked closely with the client team to make sure my designs and how we were building on the Sitecore platform would be flexible enough for the ever-changing needs of so many different departments and types of people.

Documenting Design Decisions

Throughout our design process, I have my team maintain detailed documentation – decisions made, descriptions of elements, interactions, and motion – and work closely with the client’s team to align priorities, content, and goals, and produce the best combination of business and user needs and experience in the final product.

Building Blocks + Templates for Varying Levels of Client Tech Confidence

So many different people needed to have access to this new platform, to create events, update department sections, etc, and all of them had different confidence levels when it came to maintenance.

So I designed modular building blocks for those with more assurity to create their own pages with their own designs, and pre-built whole-page templates for common needs that would be available for anyone to use quickly.

Optimizing the Capabilities of Sitecore for Pinpoint Customization

Sitecore is a powerful platform for identifying users and categorizing them to give them personalized experiences. Learning to design in a way to utilize these powerful capabilities was challenging, and quite exciting.

Next Steps

Designing Opportunities for Growing Engagement

My strategist partner and I developed the concept of Channels to roll out in a future version of the AGU platform and grow user engagement. With Channels, AGU could realize their goals of becoming a repository of knowledge and a destination for science news and learning.

Continue Iterating

Our team’s design process doesn’t stop when development phase starts, and I maintain constant communication throughout the development process. We work closely with our development team to translate concepts and designs throughout the building process, and proactively grow and adapt designs to solve any issues and address any feedback that comes up during development and user testing. Even after the design is “finished,” built, and deployed, we continue to collect data and feedback, evaluate, and design for growth over the life of the digital product.