WA PLAY STRATEGY
A collaborative website design and creation project
This was a team project. I worked with one other graphic designer to complete this website, and therefore the following represents the work completed by the two of us and not me alone.
Early Childhood Australia’s Western Australian branch is seeking endorsement of a WA Play Strategy. Their campaign requires community support to drive this initiative forward with a view to having a State Government-lead WA Play Strategy. The community may offer support through endorsement of the campaign and leaving comments about their own experiences with play-based learning on the website.
The client’s goals consisted of: promoting community endorsement of a WA Play Strategy by informing and engaging with the community both online and at events, allowing for, and encouraging active community engagement in the campaign, improving the SEO so that it is better than that of the current website, and more easily found, for this website to be a portal for resources related to play-based learning, and lastly for this website to be presented in a professional manner.
We produced mood boards based on research we did into the audience of the website. These were then presented to the client, who identified most with the brightly coloured moodboard. This gave us a direction to move in as we began to design the structure of the website.
In developing a wireframe for the homepage of the website, we made sure we kept in mind the client’s goals. This was what dictated the visual hierarchy.
The other pages that we created wireframes for included: the ‘Get Involved’ page, the ‘About and Contact’ page, and the ‘Endorse’ page. The ‘Get Involved’ page was the location for resources to do with play-based learning as well as being a centre for event notices. The ‘About and Contact’ page was simply a description of the campaign and a form for contacting the client should users want more information. The ‘Endorse’ page was also simple and only included a small description of how endorsing would help the campaign towards a WA Play Strategy, and a form for users to complete.
These three design comps represent our progress.
As can be seen, we went from having a simple layout with basic colours from the colour palette in the mood board, to having a somewhat more complex and busy layout.
This development was a result of wanting to make the website feel more fun, yet still professional.
The comp on the far right is what was presented to the client, however it was felt that this was too busy and complicated to manage alone, leading to a complete redesign. To avoid any future misunderstandings around the design and functionality of the website, we redesigned it in partnership with the client – with her in the room, giving us constant feedback. In hindsight, this is how we should have designed it from the beginning, with a lot more client feedback and involvement.It is important to note that only one of the client’s goals was re-evaluated during the re-design process - getting rid of the portal for resources idea.
