Overview
IQPC online communities provide a medium for event attendees to maintain relationships established at events / conferences, and even find new people with a common objective to facilitate conversations around a wide range of topic areas. Users gain access to a steady stream of FREE content including podcasts, webinars and presentations from industry leaders on key topics aligned with IQPC events. Members receive complimentary access to additional resources including webinars from industry leaders, white papers, tailored research, data products and email newsletters.
Users / Audience
• Directors, VPs, C-Level
• Manager Level
• Analysts & Specialists
Project Scope
Design a system:
• So that the user interface template is consistent across all community portals
• Facilitates flexibility for individual community portals to conform to their individual brand guidelines
• Promotes and encourages membership
• Improves navigation that displays article types and categories
• Shows multiple types of featured content
• Improves content search features
• Facilitates ad banner placement for sponsors and vendors
• Enables easy social media sharing
Responsibilities
As the Lead UI/UX Designer on this project, my role was to work with the Product Owner, Project Manager and Software Developers to gather and understand the overall project requirements, objectives, goals and expectations. Based on my research and understanding of user goals and challenges, using an iterative process, I was then required to create wireframes, interactive prototypes and eventually final, finished and approved mockups ready for the development team to work with.
UI/UX Design Process / Workflow
Research
I interviewed online portal Directors, Digital Marketing and Editorial Managers who were responsible for content, promotional and advertising strategies. These interviews provided invaluable insights into their challenges when creating, formatting and publishing content, and additional tools they needed such as comprehensive user analytics reports.
I then conducted additional web research into various online content portals, analyzing those that were highly user-centric with intuitive navigation, user-friendly content search capabilities, and a modern and professional design.
I also analyzed web design best practices for displaying complex content such as the content that would be displayed in IQPC’s community portals. My research and analysis revealed that the Masonry grid system was the best solution to satisfy user requirements.
Prototyping
Using the Masonry grid system, I created and refined a series of rough wireframe paper sketches before moving on to create a prototype using Adobe Photoshop. We tested and prototyped 2-, 3-, 4-, 5- and 6-column formats, and based on stakeholder test results, the 4-column grid layout was the overwhelming choice. At that point, I designed a refined proof of concept for all key stakeholders to approve before moving on to development.
Development
Once I handed off the finished mockups to the Development Team, I worked with them to address any UI/UX design/development concerns. I prepared design styleguides for each community portal for front-end developers to follow. I updated/revised my designs between sprints as needed.
End Result
IQPC Community Portals now have a user-centric, state-of-the-art digital product to reflect its best-in-class content and services for its members. The end result led to significantly increased traffic, member subscriptions and sponsored content.
Adove: final template chosen by management team. Each portal would have its own color scheme implemented and designed.
Above: portal color guides
Below: several design variations proposed.
