Ideation
With a clear vision of what AIR’s website could accomplish, we began generating design ideas to shape prototypes of the future site. We incorporated the best of these ideas into our early designs. We used the following methods early on to spark new ideas.
Brainstorming
We began the design phase by brainstorming to generate ideas for the website redesign. We reviewed all of our synthesized data from the research phase, including our work models for our research participants and our competitive analysis findings.
Independent Sketching
By sketching first independently and then sharing our creations with one another, we hoped to explore a large amount of design variations in a relatively short span of time. Once we shared and discussed the different variations, we then consolidated designs and began to move toward a more group-involved set of screens to begin wireframing.
Affinity Diagramming
We used affinity diagramming to organize brainstormed ideas for the new website. As a bottom-up method, affinity diagramming helped us to organize individual ideas and identify overarching themes within them. The results of the affinity diagramming helped to fuel discussion about the different ideas and also to build upon them with new ideas.
Card Sorting
To explore different organization schemes for site content, we performed several informal card sorting sessions with students, with the goal of finding problems with regard to the site hierarchy and also the labeling for the different categories of the site.
Personas & Scenarios
Testing participants sorted categories of AIR’s web content, giving us insight into their conceptual models and leading us to modify the site’s organization. We created three personas to model three distinct users of the AIR website we modeled. These personas were modeled based on the stakeholder groups of most importance to the AIR website and also representative of the overall audience. For each persona, we wrote scenarios to demonstrate how that individual might use the website and how it supports their individual goals and motivations.
We built an affinity diagram to categorize and make sense of the myriad of ideas produced during brainstorming.