What is the mission of the design organization?
Team MFAwesome strives to provide high caliber design services while keeping the end user in mind. We believe the overall success of a website is measured by the ease of user-interaction. Team MFAwesome communicates openly with the client throughout the entire design process to better understand their needs. Through our design services, we will assist in the better understanding of websites, their function, and a users-interaction with a particular site. Team MFAwesome supports new possibilities and insights that our clients, stakeholders, and constituents may bring to our design process.
What is the mission of the client organization?
Harlot is a digital magazine and web forum dedicated to provoking playful and serious conversations about rhetoric — from reality television to public monuments, religion to pop music, and everything in between. As a netroots campaign in rhetorical literacy, Harlot promotes critical response to the endless streams of subtly persuasive communication that surround us every day. Harlot believes that rhetorical analysis and production can help us to better understand and more effectively and ethically influence our communities and world. And so Harlot offers a space for relevant, accessible criticism and collaborative meaning-making.
Goals and strategies
The design team's visual communication skills coupled with the understanding of information architecture will achieve the following goals for the Harlot online publication:
- Generate more online activity and retain more users in between journal releases.
- Create a stronger online presence through interactive components such as wiki and blog postings for both the public "real world" and academic audiences.
- Revamp the overall look and feel of the Harlot site to read more as a digital meeting space and less as an academic journal, therefore facilitating the client's intention to create a new form of public intellectualism through social media.
These goals will be accomplished by redesigning and restructuring the current Harlot website. A final clickable prototype and plan for the future of the new website will be prepared as a final deliverable to the client.
How will creating this web site support your mission?
In support of our client's mission, the update of this website will act as a tactic to foster communication between our client, their stakeholders, constituents, and most importantly the end user. In addition, the creation of a website will help facilitate an educational experience for our team (as young web designers) and our client (as persons interested in building their online presence).
What are the two or three most important goals for the site?
- Generate more online activity and retain more users in between journal releases; to be measured through standard web-analytics and site traffic metrics.
- Create a stronger online presence through interactive components such as wiki and blog postings for both the public "real world" and academic audiences; to be measured through standard web-analytics and bounce rates.
- Revamp the overall look and feel of the Harlot site to read more as a digital meeting space and less as an academic journal, therefore facilitating the client's intention to create a new form of public intellectualism through social media; to be measured through standard web-analytics as well as both client and end-user feedback.
Who is the primary audience for the web site?
As defined by clients:
- Hip, not necessarily young, but culturally relevant users
- Not necessarily liberal
- Students and real world users communicating together freely in this digital meeting space
- Users who may also like slate.com, adbusters, or bitch.com
In addition to the above stated goals, Team MFAwesome will provide research and insights into assisting the client in understanding and more clearly defining an initial target audience for their website.
What do you want the audience to think or do after having visited your site?
Our redesigned website will leave the user with a new found understanding of the subject matter of rhetoric. The user will be able to easily register to become a subscriber to the site where they can then participate in the communication with other users. They will be able to contribute their own information to the site and help expand the knowledge bank of rhetorical science. The user will find that Harlot is relevant, interesting, and up to date with current theories and practices in the rhetorical sciences.
What design-related strategies will you use to achieve those goals?
Strategies of user-centered participatory design methods will be used to achieve the project goals. The design team will gather information from user input and user testing to validate the design. The design team will also conduct comparative studies with competitors to the Harlot journal. Current conventions of web usability provided by Yale, Neilson, Tufte, Garrett, and Krug will be applied throughout all phases of the project.
How will you measure the success of your site?
The success of the site will be measured by the feedback received from the user-testing of the final prototype. For future measuring and evaluating, recommendations will be made to compare beginning analytics to future analytics. Analytics will be installed if no analytics are currently in place. Overall, the happiness and feedback of the client and both regular and new users will determine the new site's success.
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ReplyDeleteHowdy folks -
ReplyDeleteWe've been messing around with the site language behind the scenes. The project info that's live right now seems a bit, well, stilted. (We're academics, we readily admit; but while top-hat-formal language works for us a lot of time, _Harlot_ isn't the space for it. Here's one of the possible replacements we're considering:
Harlot is a netroots project aimed at provoking rhetorical literacy for everyday life. We strongly believe that exploring, analyzing, and understanding how persuasion works makes us better people--or, at the very least, a whole helluva lot more interesting. Our goal is to bring you smart and savvy insights about rhetoric by publishing a digital magazine twice a year, once in autumn (October 15th) and then again in spring (April 15th). But we also want to be more. We want Harlot to be an interactive space, where you can create and critique, entertain and edify whenever the urge strikes. A both/neither combination of pop culture 'zine and academic journal, Harlot aims to be your venue for all things rhetorical.
And another:
To critique. To create. To conversate. To analyze how we communicate. To practice our own forms of persuasion. To seduce you into believing rhetoric is more than a slanderous political term or a subject only professors contemplate. Harlot is your venue for all that is rhetorical, powerful, and playful.
(Your suggestions on language are welcomed as much as design, though I suspect you might have to get a better sense of the project first.)
Rawk.