As we end the Design Planning & User Testing phase, we’re leaving behind the open-ended, abstract, and hypothetical exercises that helped us plan the new homepage:
- The research, stakeholder interviews and data crunching that helped us define our audience and mandate
- °Õ³ó±ðÌýbenchmarking and brand alignment work that resulted in our basic design elements
- The brainstorming and sketching exercises around wireframing and content strategy
- The proposed mockups and the prototype we used to communicate and test our ideas for the complete homepage
These exercises provided us with the information needed to set clear goals, draft a response to those goals, and test our approach. Now that we have those results, we can revise our mockups, menu architecture, and production plan based on the feedback from real users. We look forward to sharing a list of those revisions, and to the more detailed (and official) mockups we’ll be sharing and building out in the Production phase.
That doesn’t mean we’ve entirely left curiosity and flexibility behind. Even with our test results, we know that we’ll need more data in order to decide if (and how) to improve the user experience in certain areas. We also know that our live site will reach a larger and more diverse audience than we could test with in advance.
But as the Design Planning & User Testing phase comes to a close, we have the confidence to dive into the exciting work of turning flat pictures and notes into a real live website. We hope that you share the excitement – and the confidence! – we feel as we move into the Production phase of the project. To that end, we encourage you (as always) to get in touch with any questions, comments, or concerns about the project.
Sincerely,
The Web Evolution Program Team