Note: This project was confidential, so I have omitted and changed some details.

Goal

A large technology company was launching a pilot program for their partners. They wanted to provide their partners with the information they need to successfully participate in the program, through easy-to-use web pages, rather than the cumbersome PDF documents they had been using.

Approach

Because the key goal was to provide easy access to the information users needed, without requiring them to wade through long PDF documents, I created medium-fidelity interactive wireframes, simulating many user interactions such as expanding and contracting content elements, linking from one page to another, etc. This kind of prototype typically shows layout fairly precisely, but leaves many aspects of visual design and content to be determined later. A key benefit of this type of prototype is that being able to interact with the prototype, much as if it were the real system, enables those evaluating the designs to provide rich, informative feedback. And because the prototype is only medium fidelity it is still relatively inexpensive to iteratively improve the design in response to feedback.

Results

I studied the content and structure of the existing PDF documents and considered how it could best be presented in an web page, taking advantage of interactivity to enable large amounts of information to be presented in a more manageable way, where users could more easily see what was available and drill down only into the details of relevance to them.

The design I proposed, and then refined in light of stakeholder feedback, included interactive elements such as sets of expandable sections.

Impact

The company was able to provide partners participating in their pilot program with a significantly easier way to access detailed information about the program than had previously been possible using PDF documents, thereby increasing the effectiveness of the program and partners’ enthusiasm for it.