Information Architecture

This is an example project of some of the freelance work I do from a user experience perspective. This project included user research, information architecture, and user experience design with notated wireframes. It did not include visual design. What you see here is one half of the project as the other half was for the internal version of the site.

The problems with the site were brought out in the research, more on the internal than the external, but most had to do with navigation and the ability for users to find what they were looking for. My solution was to give the site updated navigation so that second level was accessible from any page rather than having to click on a section to get to a page to get to the navigation for that section.

Though the site has changed since I first completed this project 4 years ago, you can tell from proposed and the previous sitemaps that many of my most important proposals were implemented and still exist today.

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This is an example of redesigning a Software as a Service from the ground up, starting with the navigation. The challenge here was that there were multiple modules within the application that were all developed and designed differently and each had their own set of navigation points. This meant that as a user made his way through the system it was difficult to keep track of where they were and how they got there.

Through user research, I learned that users often used options across all modules during a single session. Additionally, users had a hard time navigating the system and finding what they needed when they needed it. Thus, I redesigned the system so that it was user-centric rather than module-centric.  Here are examples of the new navigation system I designed both the visuals and interactions for compared to the original one (at the end). All of the work for this was completed in Adobe Photoshop. The screens you see below are from the released product.

HRSmart has since been acquired by Deltek.

Click on the images to view them.