Category: user experience

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West 104th Street Block Association Moves Ahead with Student Design

The West 104th Street Block Association voted to adopt the website design and strategy developed by my team at Pratt Institute. The new web design will update the association’s site from the outdated world of frames and IE4 era optimization to a sleek, modern WordPress interface. Key improvements include an organized layout, legible fonts, searchable newsletter archive, updated content, livelier images, and the ability for board members to edit and add content without needing to understand HTML or php.

While the site is in production, here is a peek at the old and new sites:

Screen Shot 2014-04-06 at 1.49.48 PM

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Stump and Moo

…and for my first piece of post-MLIS magic, I started a project cataloging cows. Literally. It’s a small cattle ranch management app and won’t be public. Mostly coding and connecting to no-SQL database MongoDB, which is based in JSON and has interesting linked data possibilities.

I have also started interning at Architecture_MPS, an online architecture journal. I am developing an image archive of presidential campaign photos from 2000 to 2012. More when there is something to show.

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Fall Projects: User Research

My Information Architecture class conducted a semester-long, group project to develop a website prototype for a small business or nonprofit group. My group, including Eleanor Meyer, Jan Diolola, Storey Radziunas and me, formed a group called Community Design and selected the West 104th Street Block Association as our client. Since I have a prior relationship with the block association as the caretaker of their digital newsletter repository, I had close access to members of the association board and the community and knew that their site was in desperate need of a facelift.

We each selected a different user population to study including senior citizens and older adults, families living in the neighborhood, young families considering a move to the neighborhood and couples without children. My group presented our design to the block association, who has agreed to adopt it for their next redesign. Next step is building the thing. Congrats, Team!

Read more about this project at my Pratt SILS E-Portfolio:

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The 2009 IA Institute Salary and Benefits Survey Opens

The 2009 IA Institute Salary and Benefits Survey is now open at:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=rnk5PuDVMuIRC1QwwS9PtA_3d_3d

The survey takes only a minute or two to complete, so we hope you’ll stop by and contribute.

We have made slight edits from last year including a much simpler matrix of responses for IA related tasks, a more normalized breakdown of salary ranges and a further refinement of job titles and experience levels. I enjoyed reviewing last year’s comments regarding medical benefits especially in light of current debate over US healthcare, but because we are an international organization, we went for simple this year and made only a few minor changes.

As in previous years, the survey will remain open through October, and we will post the results on the IAI website in late November/early December.