For this week’s assignment, we received a hypothetical RFP for resigning the greatbuildings.com website. The current site is confusing, brings you though loops, and leads you outside of the site without you expecting to. It suffers from many things, but it mainly seems like they didn’t think about how the site would be experienced as a whole from the user’s perspective. The lack of visual hierarchy and the confusing information architecture makes the site difficult to navigate.
Our sample RFP defines the project’s objectives as:
- Make it easy for students and people passionate about buildings and architecture to find what they are looking for and learn more about what they find
- Encourage discovery and exploration of new buildings
- Be a resource for information about buildings
- Encourage a community of interest around architecture and buildings
- Allow the community to enhance the catalog of buildings and related information
I broke this down into 3 objectives for the user:
- Be able to conduct research
- Browse and discover interesting content
- Identify themselves within the community
From there, I fleshed out the revised architecture for the site at the top of this post.