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IxDA Awards Site Redesign

User-Centered Redesign

As part of a graduate course in User Centered Web Design, in Autumn 2021, our team of 5 from the University of Washington's HCDE Masters program had 8 weeks to research and redesign IxDA's Interaction Awards website.

Context


The Interaction Awards was founded by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), an international member-supported organization dedicated to interaction design. The existing awards website was separate from the interaction week conference site and acted as a living library of past winning projects, starting from its first awards in 2012.

Group Members

Team members: Ji Su Park, Natasha Alcantra, Rosanna Liu, Tony Li, Xuefei Long

Final Presentation

Key Problems

  • Searching for past projects is not intuitive
  • Elements like headlines cannot be read by screen readers for accessibility
  • Information on entering the competition is unclear
  • Social media channels are not well integrated

Objective

The primary purpose of redesigning the Interaction Awards website is to create a more user-friendly and accessible experience for people navigating the website.

Goals

Business Goals

  • Increase user engagement with more efficient submission/voting process
  • Improve searchability of website content

Branding Goals

  • Create consistency by reducing amount of design patterns, and create reusable designs

Usability Goals

  • Simplify site navigation
  • Improve site accessibility

User Research

Comparative Analysis

We started with a comparative analysis, comparing the Interaction Awards with several other leading design competitions: Core77, Red Dot Design Awards, ConveyUX, and the Index Project.

Comparative Strength of IxDA

  • Rich information on projects

Areas for Improvement

  • Accessibility and hierarchy of text
  • Categorization and searchability
  • Visual system
  • Consistency

Personas

Based on conversations with our client about user goals and tasks, as well as the client's existing personas for the IxDA conference, we devised our own personas for the awards site.

Primary Persona: Award Seeker

Persona profile of Ashley Award: wants to develop their portfolio and be recognized for their work

Secondary Persona: The Company Sponsor

Persona profile of Corey Corporate: wants to sponsor to boost their company

Tertiary Persona: The Trend Seeker

Persona profile of Trianna Trend Seeker: wants to stay in-the-know on creative ideas and interaction technologies

Card Sorting

Since the information architecture was an area we identified as an opportunity to improve, we conducted an open card sort with 9 participants, including students from this class as well as from the client team.

Similarity matrix example of card sort
Qualitative categories of card sort results, including Home, About, Submit, and Projects, among others

Design

Design Principles

Based on the research and client constraints, we came up with 4 design principles to guide our project: credible, simple, visible, and accessible.

  • Credible: Build trust in the IxDA award and its website
  • Simple: Leave uninmportant information outside of the design
  • Visible: Let users know their options and how to access
  • Accessible: Making information digestible, and avoid jargon

Information Architecture and Wireframes

A partial view of the team's information architecture, based on card sort results and business goals, outlining each page and subpage, split up by award period.

We also used the research results and business goals to formulate the information architecture, validating with more users using tree tests. This information architecture became the basis for our mockup prototype:

Mockup wireframes of the prototype based on the information architecture. Tony worked on the Submit and FAQ wireframes.

Usability Testing and Iteration

Methods for Usability Tests

We iterated on the prototype by conducting usability tests: 3 back-to-back on the original website and the prototypes, as well as 3 only on the prototype. We focused usability tasks on the primary persona.

Overall, the general feedback was that the prototype was fairly easy and clear. 3 key insights:

  • Look and feel is important
  • Put what people want to find, where they expect it to me
  • Simpler is better. Make artifacts easy to find and tasks easy to do

Class Deliverable: Final(?) Prototype


Design Iteration

After the course ended with the quarter, we took our design and continued working with the client to iterate and see it through to implementation. We worked closely with the client's developer to mock up the design and iterate on any design issues that came up in implementation.

Our design is LIVE on the IxDA Awards website!