We’re better together - Using collaborative design techniques to produce teachforamerica.org

Teach for America is a large, distributed organization with many needs and voices. When approaching a redesign and rebuild of their website, they worked with a Phase2 using a collaborative design and UX process to include the voices of numerous stakeholders and groups, producing a Drupal-based site that met the approval of a large and diverse group.

In our case study, we’ll walk through both the collaborative design and UX approaches, and how they produced a stronger, better site, including:

Design:

• Co-design sessions (client and build partner) to produce low fidelity wires
• Immersive design discovery before starting work
• Setting visual direction with light-weight artifacts
• Opting for a iterative prototyping process over flat comps

User Experience:

• Brainstorm together; sketch separately to draw out a lot of ideas to work with.
• Pick tool that help you collaborate
• Share and discuss as you create your single, unified wireframe
• Rinse & repeat until as the team finds its voice/style

And then we brought it all together, assembling the pieces from the wireframes and Pattern Lab to create a wide variety of layouts. Our design and UX process was a continuous process that allowed for a lot of different people’s input, and flexibility across a long project as requirements emerged.  Best of all, buy-in/ownership = love and enthusiasm for the project.