GlowLabs were a South London based web design and development agency

I was hired as an independent contractor to work on a client project for the GlowLabs team. Their client, AlertMe, had hired GlowLabs to design and develop a new website for their consumer electronics products and services.

I was hired to provide Information Architecture expertise.

I worked closely with both the Glowlabs team and their client’s project team. Before starting on the Information Architecture design for the new site I had to understand the site’s audience and their goals. Working with the client’s own customer research I segmented the audience into five primary groups and one secondary group and then listed these group’s goals and highlighted where the client’s goals and the audience goals overlapped and met with the client to talk through my findings.

This process allowed me to challenge the client’s original goal of making their site a destination portal for energy news, and re-focus the site as a product and service portal with energy news as a secondary, supplementary set of content on the site.

Next I mapped out the sites existing Information Architecture and built up a picture of its content and functional features. This helped me understand where content was well organised, where improvements could be made and where features could be added or removed for the new design.

Then I reorganised the Information Architecture and stripped the site’s feature list back to what was needed to match the goals of the site’s audiences (and those of the client).

This proposed Information Architecture was revised after it was presented back to the client and their feedback was fed into the design.

With a clear architecture mapped out I then wireframed key screens for the new site; landing pages, blog pages, product & service pages, etc. These went through a number of iterations of build – present to the client – get feedback – rework – repeat. This allowed me to uncover a series of missing requirements and incorporate them into the designs.

I handed the final versions of the wireframes, and the supporting documentation over to the GlowLabs design team who used them and the brand guidelines from the client to start mocking up interface designs for the site.