Introduction
Even though I was brought on as a UI/UX designer for the Content Lab at Demand Media's content agency, studioD, I was first tasked with helping the marketing team create a redesigned homepage for studioD.com (now defunct, but there's a partially cached version of it here. Be sure to close the archive.org header to get to the navigation!).
studioD had an in-house brand designer, but the team lacked UX expertise, so I took initiative on gathering the requirements for this project. This entailed scheduling meetings with the management team and marketing team to figure out what content we would feature on the website, as well as the direction of the brand voice and tone of copy.
Responsibilities:
User research, user journey, sitemap, wireframes, and some light project management.
Team members involved:
Brand designer for the visual design
Product manager for definition of brand and voice (who also coded the entire site, since our engineering team was swamped!).
User research, user journey, sitemap, wireframes, and some light project management.
Team members involved:
Brand designer for the visual design
Product manager for definition of brand and voice (who also coded the entire site, since our engineering team was swamped!).
User Research and Discovery
From these meetings with various people from different departments, I was able to get a better idea of what kind of audience this website was meant to target. I interviewed the editors who directly interface with content creators, the business development team who interface directly with brands (our clients), and I also interviewed the GM of studioD, to get an idea of what he expected the site to convey.
I took extensive notes and put together a user journey, persona, and a sitemap in order to provide more clarity into our messaging and to focus the goal of studioD and its services.
Once the sitemap was established, I began to work on wireframes for the site. Below is just a sample of the wireframes I created for the entire site.
Home Page Wireframe
Services Page Wireframe
Our Work Wireframe
Library Page Wireframe
Final Design
After I completed the wireframes, I handed them off to our brand designer. We worked closely to make sure that the designs made sense and were not only usable but fun to use. She was able to translate my wireframes into these great, bright, and fun designs that nailed our brand's voice and story.
You can view the archived version of the home page only here. Thank you for reading!