Impact Record
Designing a Way to Recognize History’s Undersung Heroes
Overview
My Role
My role in the project was solutioning ideas to summarize and display information, building high fidelity mockups, and creating an Impact Record style guide.
The Team
Designers:
Tori Keller, Jinyoung Kim
Developer:
Robert Guillen
Founder of Impact Record:
Jessica Greenwalt
The Challenge
As part of the Make a Mark hackathon, my team partnered with Impact Record, a nonprofit organization dedicated to spreading the positive impact of those who have been overlooked throughout history. Impact Record asked the team to design a way to tell the stories of history’s undersung heroes in an approachable way via articles in an online encyclopedia.
The Solution
At the end of the 12-hour hackathon, we redesigned Impact Record’s UI, focusing on explorability and making the information easy to digest.
Discover
How the Team Can Add Value: Long Term Strategy and Scale Up
Impact Record needs a way to scale up easily as it grows. The team identified features that would support future scale up based on competitive analysis of sites that present pages of disconnected information in an organized way, like Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, and even blogs. These features included:
Advanced search features
Article category tags to sort and filter articles
Define
The Reality of Start-ups: Achieving Short Term Goals
In discussions with the founder of Impact Record, the team realized that small start-ups do not design for the long term because they may not reach that point and instead design for the short term in incremental changes that can be implemented now. The team regrouped to redefine our problem to smaller, immediately actionable changes to the UI.
Refocused Strategy: Explorable Landing Page and Easy to Digest Articles
The team redefined the design direction based on these observations of Impact Record’s UI:
Develop
Enhancing Explorability of the Landing Page
The landing page also features social media feeds to create an online community and help users stay up-to-date.
Improving Article Layout to be Easier to Digest
Accessible and Approachable Style Guide
Modifications were made to the color palette, font size, and interactive elements to meet WCAG AAA grade accessibility while maintaining a fun and credible look.
Deliver
High Fidelity Mockup: Landing Page
High Fidelity Mockup: Article Page
Presenting the Design Strategy and Deliverables
At the end of the 12-hour hackathon, the team presented our UI redesign to the founder of Impact Record and an audience of around 75 people.
The team highlighted the UI strategies that will make the website approachable for everyone who visits the site wanting to learn about history’s undersung heroes.
Conclusion
The team utilized different visual and organizational strategies to improve the look and feel of Impact Record’s site. The proposed UI will help users discover articles and find manageable amounts of information, all of which enhances the user experience.