West 104th Street Block Association Talks IA

The April 15 issue of the West 104th Street Block Association Newsletter featured the efforts of my design team in an article about the Association’s pending website redesign.

As part of the project, my design team conducted interviews, surveys and user testing of current residents, neighbors and prospective residents. These were divided into four test groups including families with children, younger residents (couples and singles), those aged 55 and over and those considering a move to the neighborhood. The block association reported that “The respondents to the survey requested that the website be reorganized to find information more easily with an emphasis on portraying a ‘neighborhood feel.’” Indeed, my team found a great need among the test population for findable and accessible information.

My specific user test population included site users aged 55 and older. Among the requirements of this group, legibility and safety information was the most important need, and descriptive pictures of the block’s people and activities were especially appreciated.

The Information Architecture community also got a shout out:

“We are very lucky to have an information architect on our block to develop our ‘new and improved’ website that will be informative for all our residents.”

It is an honor to be recognized by the block for our contribution, and I thank my teammates for doing such a great job. We expect to launch the new site in June.

Read more about the West 104th Street Block Association Web Redesign.

Fall Projects: User Research

My Information Architecture class conducted a semester-long, group project to develop a website prototype for a small business or nonprofit group. My group, including Eleanor Meyer, Jan Diolola, Storey Radziunas and me, formed a group called Community Design and selected the West 104th Street Block Association as our client. Since I have a prior relationship with the block association as the caretaker of their digital newsletter repository, I had close access to members of the association board and the community and knew that their site was in desperate need of a facelift.

We each selected a different user population to study including senior citizens and older adults, families living in the neighborhood, young families considering a move to the neighborhood and couples without children. My group presented our design to the block association, who has agreed to adopt it for their next redesign. Next step is building the thing. Congrats, Team!

Read more about this project at my Pratt SILS E-Portfolio:

Summer School

My summer involved a full set of research courses, including Museums & Library Research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Researching Local Histories and the Summer Map Institute at NYPL. The workload was a bit heavy due to the fact that the MetMuseum course was not actually a two week course, as noted in the bulletin, but two weeks of seminar followed by a month of intensive research. Ultimately it was a great experience, working in three very different kinds of research: museum artifacts, local landmarks and maps.


NYC Garden Maps, a WordPress site on community gardening in New York City

My map project on NYC Garden Maps is done. I am editing the final deliverables for presentation here, including a walking tour of the Bloomingdale neighborhood on the Upper West Side and a MetMuseum exhibition guide. Look for these shortly.

Also, I spent the summer with my linked data team refining our paper on "Linked Data for Cultural Institutions," which has been accepted to ACM's 2013 SIGDOC conference. This has been a challenging and extremely rewarding experience and I thank my teammates and co-authors, Julia Marden, Carolyn Li-Madeo and Jeff Edelstein of Pratt Institute. I celebrated the end of an intense summer with two weeks in the Massachusetts Berkshires.