Intellectual Ventures

Content Strategy

IV’s purpose was confusing, what did they do? Careful attention was applied while planning and designing pages because it was important to create concise and powerful messaging. New content was also created for this project such as “Meet IV” – A section of the website for staff interviews and internal testimony.

The old website content was completely audited, categorized, and refreshed for integration into the new website. Great consideration was given to the content migration process to savor previous SEO efforts. To save time the data was converted to XML and then bulk-uploaded into the new content management system.

Information Architecture & User Experience Design

I was the lead IA/UX designer while mentoring a junior UX designer throughout this project.  I facilitated a series of focus groups and stakeholder interviews to gain valuable insights for project kick off.  Our team also ran a competitor analysis to deepen conversations and spark ideas.  After the requirements were gathered and the scope was refined, a new sitemap schema was created to help visually show the proposed architecture.  Together we worked through 7 rounds of revisions on the sitemap document.

I individually contributed and collaborated on 21 different wireframes alongside a junior UX designer. We delivered a detailed deck that included annotations and interactive functionality.  Together we collaborated on 4 rounds of wireframes before final approval.

Design System

A component-based design system was created to help solve digital consistency problems within the organization. This also guided our visual design concepts and reinforced a modular component methodology.  I managed and collaborated with a full time visual designer on this project. 
The client then used our final design system and overall art direction to extend other print and advertising collateral.

Together we collaborated on 3 rounds of the new design system before final approval.

21 Unique Page Template Layouts

The overall website experience had many one-off requirements making this truly a unique puzzle. Many global components were created to keep the brand style consistent however we extended layout design to help cultivate better experiences with a content-first approach. While many of the layouts were unique, some of the pages leveraged custom component-based page authoring tools to help keep the system DRY.

Together we collaborated on 4 rounds of visual design layouts before final approval.

Interactive Experiences

Clever UI animations can be seen sprinkled throughout the website. The “What We Do” page needed in particular required deep storytelling and interactivity. This full screen interactive experience was designed to educate and immerse users, showcasing positive brand content and large scientific milestones. I designed, explored and prototyped a video with multiple animated options of the proposed interactive timeline using Adobe After Effects.

I presented 3 concepts and revised the chosen concept once before final approval.

Content Management System

The ability to update their website independently was an important requirement of this website redesign project. I worked closely with their corporate communications team to develop useful component-based content curation tools like image galleries, FAQs, embedded videos, forms, etc. The marketing team was finally able to create custom page content with drag and drop functionality. Design constraints were put into place so that they could not break the new brand guidelines, maintaining overall integrity and keeping the website design consistent and clean.