Troubleshooter
Site review and report
1 day workshop, team exercises & presentation
Follow up support
Raconteur were in the process of redesigning the front-end of their main publishing site, raconteur.net. At the same time they were reorganising their content with a new taxonomy. Wireframes were shared with me that showed a few alternatives for the main navigation.
I was asked to suggest improvements to the proposed designs, discuss alternatives and identify any issues they may have missed.
I was the first UX designer that Raconteur had worked with, and I arranged the day workshop to go through my report and set some team exercises.
“Andy worked with us at a crucial stage during the redesign of our website. He not only used his own skills and experience to significantly improve our designs, but pushed me and my team to really question what we were doing and why.
We benefited greatly from Andy’s insight even after his contract finished.”
Actions and outcomes
I provided a competitor review - especially around top navigation and how other sites with a lot of content solve this problem. Examples looked at were the Guardian’s mega-menu, The Wall Street Journal and gov.uk, among others.
I led three workshop exercises which included a product definition exercise, user flows and taxonomy / card sorting.
Implementation of my suggestions, here’s some examples;
Perform a site audit - how much content do you have and how can you group it?
Do users arrive knowing what they are looking for? Do they search or browse/discover?
How to best organise the topics - alphabetical?
‘View’ rather than ‘Select’ call to action on infographics.
More affordance on clickable elements.
Styling and hierarchy suggestions.Provided a challenging new perspective without company bias, a clear benefit of being a consultant.
I advised on how to run a digital project, from stand up and sprints to the software I use, and how I work with developers and product owners.
The full story
Kick off:
I started off with a definition exercise, giving everyone five minutes to write a two sentence description of Raconteur. It’s always fascinating to see what everyone thinks the key drivers of their product are. Asking those present to read these out gave everyone a chance to air their views and it’s a great warm up.
Wireframe review:
I then started on the wireframe reviews and the navigation on the website - and how successful they were in achieving their aims. Aware that some of those in the room had a direct input on what I was critiquing meant for an inclusive presentation, supporting all my claims with data and examples where possible. In truth, reviewing is the easy part compared to building something from scratch.
Inspiration and example board:
As part of the workshop I presented different nav options from the Guardian’s mega menu to Intercom’s side bar slide out. We looked at sites that handle large amounts of data, such as gov.uk and how they use overlapping vertical lists.
Signing off:
Raconteur were an impressive team and keen to get me back in the future.
“I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Andy to other companies looking for a great UX/UI designer. ”
Some of the pages and navigation we reviewed