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Idaho Mountain Express Site Redesign

Role: Interaction Design Intern

Working as an Interaction Design and technology strategist intern I learned the business and online presence of the weekly Idaho Mountain Express newspaper and delivered an analysis of their online presence and redesign of their website. I worked closely with multiple staff roles, as well as subscription holders, to create a potential redesign, and also to provide a report showing importance of an up-to-date online presence, and how it was achievable at an affordable cost.

Original Design

Delivered Design

Summary

I held a self-directed internship position at a media company located in Sun Valley, ID. My work focused on creating and managing a strong online presence, and improving the current news page website for Idaho Mountain Express. I worked on content management systems, information architecture, and website redesign. I used tools such as card sorts, wire-framing, mockups, and cost estimations. I was able to work and communicate with business professionals, journalists, management teams, and information technology staff members on my design insights and suggestions.

I delivered a document containing user test results, card sort results, competitive analysis, wire frames, sketches mock ups, design suggestions, budget costs, using tools like Omnigraffle and Adobe Creative Suite. Working in a newsroom for a professional media company I was able to explore and learn about different constraints in terms of time, budgets, deadlines, new content, technical limitations in a unique work environment.

Process

For this internship I worked closely with the circulation manager/magazine & internet sales manager, while reporting weekly to the publisher to first understand the business of a newspaper, including the departments responsible for the content and look of the paper, and also how the sales team and business departments keep the whole process going. I met with the head of each department to understand what each department was responsible for, as well as the technology they used to do their job.

I then spent time looking at the competition for the newspaper in their market as well as looking at other similar companies who were also located in resort communities. I attended a City Commerce event on social media to talk with other local business people to talk about their thoughts on the newspapers online and email news updates.

I then took the current website for the newspaper and pulled out all the important terminology. I used this list of terms to run a card sort on a group of people including employees from multiple departments as well as people outside of the company who read the newspaper both on and offline.

I used the results of the card sort activities as well as the results of my analysis of other similar newspaper websites to begin sketching a new layout for the information on the Mountain Express’ homepage. After completing a wireframe and reviewing it with the publisher and head of IT for the company I mocked up a higher fidelity mock up of a potential website redesign to illustrate some of the main points I had learned working with the readers of the paper.

I then spent time researching the time and cost to hire a company to come in and create a new CMS system, merge the data from the existing in-house CMS, as well as to develop the new website that I had designed. This process was along with all time and money estimations were summed up in a report for the Board of Directors for the company. I also included other technology suggestions for hardware and software maintenance and security best practices.

Card Sort Results

: Card Sort Result Categories

: Allison’s Card Sort Results – Employee #1

: Ben’s Card Sort Results – Employee #2

Jason’s Card Sort Results – Regular Print and Web Reader

Current Site Critiques

Wireframe Development

Reflection

Working in a newsroom was a great opportunity to apply the skills and theory learned in my Master’s program, in a way that is unreplicable in a controlled classroom, including management of budget and time constraints. This internship involved working with people who were willing to completely buy into my process, people who were hesitant to the design process instead trying to “just start coding”, and people who didn’t mind me being there, as long as I didn’t get in their way. Though there were people who were willing to listen to my suggestions I was in a place where no one knew much about what exactly my role was. This added and additional level of complexity to the job.

It was also a challenge to plan and execute this project without others experienced in the methods and process for advise. This led to many challenges, but also many unique insights that came from my successes and failures. It was also very cool to be behind the scenes in a newspaper and in a one of a kind world class resort town.