Information Architecture
Defining user role permissions
Wireframing
SaleForce Integration
Reverse Card Sort
Defined Content Types and Organization
Worked with an external team as well as a committee with diverse needs and
MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) is where business and cutting edge research meet. Liaison Officers (ILOs) work with some of the biggest companies in the world to connect them to the vast amount of talent and research going on at any of the hundreds of departments, labs, and centers on campus. Through these relationships, these corporations are are to find cutting edge technology courtesy of MIT’s vast talent pool.
Those the work happening in MITs labs was cutting edge, the MIT ILP website was not. It was a disorganized mess that most member companies (that pay in the tens of thousands to be a part of annually) simply avoided using. Additionally, they wanted to layer in SalesForce to better allow the ILOs to see the connections their clients and the faculty were making. MIT ILP reached out to long-time partner Boston’s Captains of Industry for a redesign, and they called on us for our UX work.
During this 14-month long engagement, I worked with the Captain’s team and a working group at ILP in weekly meetings to get the project through wireframes. Captains had already done dozens of interviews with internal stakeholders and ILP members and brought me in to interpret their findings and provide suggestions for IA and wireframes.
One of the key takeaways was that users really only cared about two things: events and video. Thankfully, there were two of ILPs strong suits, they just needed a better way to get this information to their users.
During the project, I was tasked with taking the vast amount of content on the site and reorganizing it with work with the new content they wanted. From this, I built out a completely new site map that took the number of nav items from eight (with ambiguous titles like “Expertise”) and whittled it down to just four: Learn (video and editorial), Attend (events), Connect (directory of members, faculty, and startups), and About (info on ILP).
From there, I designed pages that were built to better showcase not only the vast amount of content, but to allow the editors flexibility in what articles, videos or faculty they wanted to feature.
This project was completed at Image Conscious Studios in partnership with Captains of Industry