African Institute of Mathematical Sciences Website

Project Overview

The African Institute of Mathematical Sciences needed uniformity with their Centre Websites. The brief was to develop a style guide in line with their brand manual, build a site as a template, integrate the existing centres with the designs, and train the website administrators to manage the new websites. 

My Role

My role in the project was to carry out UX Research, which includes the Information Architecture, Prototyping, Interaction Design and Visual Design. I was also the Lead Developer on the project.

Explore + Define + Ideate

We utilized User Research that was provided by the client, and also performed competition analysis and carried out Heuristic evaluation. I first requested for site information, reviewed it, and then drew up an Information architecture that factored in duplicate (translated) pages and multiple menus for each language (English and French). I did spend some time going over event websites, especially those that had to do with educational events.

After running a few prototypes by test subjects, I presented a medium-fidelity prototype to the client and my boss, of what I deduced would be effective. The great thing was that I lived in a community with a lot of students, and as I am always studying myself, I could relate to the goals of the website. I thus did a lot of testing with people I was familiar with, and with a couple multimedia design experts as well.

After a series of back and forth with the client, this was the final mockup presented:

Design + Test

Several iterations later the site was done. You can visit the project at www.nef.org/asw

Incidentally, I also did the site development and testing, as well as support and iterations during the event.

Challenges

The only challenge I had was that I didn’t have a full team to work with, but had a few assists with research and testing, but the client was great, and it was good to satisfy them at the end of the project. Also, not being embedded in an environment that recognizes design thinking, and the importance of design could be a bit of a hindrance in such projects, but the desire to develop myself in these disciplines made me gruel through the process, not bothering about getting recognition for my efforts, but knowing it was for me. I am always studying and learning, and the peak of learning is practice.