Interaction Associates

The driver on this project was time.

Interaction Associates is an international corporate consulting and business training service. They conduct conferences to instruct employees how to manage better as a team, the intricacies of human resources and how to work better in a leadership role. Attendees are provided with some extensive in-class documentation in the form of 3-ring binders that include questionnaires, interactive guides and helpful points toward these goals, but they found that their customers weren't making use of the materials after getting back to their offices. Sound familiar?

I was brought in to take their classroom material, digitize it all, reformat it for the web and provide a clean, simple, straight-forward and secure interface for their customer teams to be able to use the documentation in a practical way. The system would also function as a small CMS, recording, managing and distributing materials to internal teams within their customer companies, sometimes managing highly proprietary material.

The system had to be designed, coded, built, tested and launched in a 2-month period. It involved hand-coding dozens of pages of raw printed material into HTML and CSS and constructing a PHP back-end to handle the database and security measures.

As the project developed, user testing showed some confusion in terminology between what IA called their practices and classes and how students thought of the material and used it day to day. Rather than change the entire navigation and terminology, thereby losing some of the branded value-add from IA to their clients, an AJAX structure of pop-up help bubbles was installed that could be turned on and off by the user. This provided enough information for those who needed it to more easily manage their documents and teams while maintaining IA's proprietary 3-tiered learning structure.

JimWinters.com

Jim Winters is a San Francisco-based artist and illustrator who needed a web presence to show off his talents. What he didn't want was a static, uninteresting, dull site that wouldn't reflect his colorful, playful, outrageous style.

I didn't want the web site's interface to interfere with the impact of his work. I wanted it to function as a sort of frame for his art, but one that made it easy to explore the dozens of different works he wanted to show, plus I needed to design and code it in such a way that he could easily add, delete or change the art on display without my intervention.

Navigation would therefore be key to the overall experience. A visitor should be able to jump around at will, or look at specific media pieces, and be able to get a sense of his work—which sometimes measures in excess of 4 feet—in the rather limited display size afforded by the internet.

I designed a logo for him that would appear on every page and provide a grounding point for all the work. The interface was done in shades of gray, with a very slight gradient added to the top navigation to provide an indication to the visitor both where they are, and where they can go.

The bottom navigation within a section performs a playful dynamic trick through the use of CSS and some mouse-overs. Visit the site to see Jim's work and the web site's interface yourself.