After reading GreatBuilding’s RFP, it was necessary that I included a number of elements that contributed to a more dynamic environment that encouraged exploration, made searching and content easier to access and enhance community interaction.  In order to fulfill these obligations I felt it was best to design a site that utilized frameworks that people are familiar with in combine them to accomplish our goal.  Because this is an architecture site, pictures and visuals are incredibly important.  For this reason, I wanted to incorporate certain aspects of websites that have taken advantage of this, namely, Flickr.  With photo galleries that encourage exploration and provide easy and natural navigation to look through a lot of pictures as well as contributing your own pictures to the site, Flickr is a great resource for inspiration.  Flickr also has an active user community which is encouraged by its UI as well.

Secondly, as a reference site, GreatBuildings needs to incorporate a large database of content into a very digestible and easily navigable format.  This format also needs to be editable by the users and the UI/design should encourage that.   I used wikipedia as my guide in designing this aspect.  People are familiar with the format and it has proven itself to be an extremely successful design which encourages easy navigation through an extremely large database of reference content.

Finally, I put search first and foremost on the landing page with the understanding that this will be how most people that come to the site will want to use the site.

For my old product re-imagined I tried to use something that was found in everyday life and apply a new use to it.

Most doors in commercial buildings have a box mounted on the frame that lets the door open and shut smoothly.  This box is a common everyday item that quietly does its job, unnoticed, every single day.  In this box there is tremendous untapped potential to do even more good without changing much at all.

For years people have been using tiny hand crank generators to power things like radios, phones, and flashlights.  With small amounts of energy, power can be stored for later use.  This device, paired with the door device that thousands of people use everyday, has huge potential for creating energy.  It takes something that occurs thousands, if not millions of times a day, and applies a new function to it.

Here’s the idea:

For as long as there have been voices to sing and hands to play, music has impacted the lives of everyone.  But before there was a treble clef and a bass clef, before there were whole notes, half notes, falsetto and arpeggios, music suffered from severe user experience design depravation.  Musical notation has been in around in some form or another for as long as people had the ability to write, but it wasn’t until around 1700 that modern musical notation came about and was universally acknowledged as the interface for music.

Before music was written down musicians learned orally through repetition, passing down each song and how to play it from one musician to another.  And without any written record of each musical piece, music often changed over time and lost its original character.

Different cultures throughout history developed primitive forms of musical notation to represent pitch and tone.  The Chinese had a sophisticated system, the Egyptians and Sumerians as well, but it wasn’t until the Greeks that music notation first incorporated letters to represent different notes.  Centuries later, a form of notation  using signs called neumes was developed as a means of writing down plainsong.  These graphic signs shows the rise and fall fo the notes of a melody, but did not give a precise idea of pitch or rhythm.

The revolution in musical notations UX design came at the beginning of the 17th century when the 5 line stave was universally accepted and fractions were utilized to denote time and tempo.  Without this modern user interface design of musical notation, music would not be what it is today.  With this universal musical notation system, music has made has evolved more in the last 300 years than it did over centuries.  We have a much deeper understanding of how music works and its power to affect our hearts and minds.  As well, through music’s UX revolution, we have developed a universal language that crosses borders and surpasses languages.  Now, anywhere in the world a musician can pick up their instrument and play right the exact same symphony that was written 100 years ago on the other side of the world.  Without this revolution in music’s user experience, the wold would be an entirely different and much lonelier place.

For my maiden voyage into wire framing I thought I would take the opportunity to work on my own online portfolio. When working on the design I wanted to keep it extremely simple and let the work speak itself.

I believe I accomplished this in a couple of ways. Firstly, the landing page has the work included right on it. There is a small blurb as to what the project is along with pictures to show the work. The user can then scroll left or right to see my other work as well. The blurbs are also linked if the user wants to view more information.

Secondly, the navigation is hopefully very natural and the user has only one or two clicks to get anywhere s/he needs. I tried implementing icons that only appear once the user hovers over the buttons in the top left, which is an attempt to pull forward the proper content rather than have the user drill down.

The pictures below should help clarify exactly how the site will run.

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