A home for Bloomington artists
The Arts Alliance of Greater Bloomington wanted to create an arts directory and needed a new site to house the new addition. Although I joined the team a year into development, I discovered some design problems and worked to solve them with a team of designers.
Problem:
When I joined the team, I analyzed the home page and discovered that it had some issues . It failed to properly explain what the website had to offer the user.
Example User: "Where do these blue buttons take me and why would I click them? Does the 'Visual Arts' button take me to an art gallery?"
Solution:
I proposed an alternative design that added some much needed context and guidance to users, without drastically changing the page's design.
Example User: "If I click 'Visual Arts,' I imagine I'll find individuals and groups in that field."
I identified a potential issue with the site's primary navigation menu. As you can see, the "Arts Directory" dropdown menu had many tiers of sub-dropdown menus, which actually extended horizontally off the page on smaller computer screens.
I designed a potential solution to the dropdown problem. By removing the "Arts Directory" menu item from the primary nav-bar and creating a new "Arts Directory" nav-bar below it, I effectively eliminated the first tier of the sub-menus.
Through Powerpoint, I effectively presented this solution to the rest of the design team and to the client.
In the end, a different solution was chosen, but that's what happens sometimes when working with a team of creatives.