Website for the Photography Design, Department of NID Gandhinagar.
Objective
The website’s primary objective is to display student works and become a channel for professional interaction (in the form of an online exhibition). It also serves as a portal for understanding the objective of more extensive department engagement. The space is also directed to form a consolidated database of current and past students to create a link to their interests, works, and profiles.
Product Goals
Student database: past & present, a space to showcase works related to the photography department and the department’s information.
Research
The research for the project was done in three phases-
1. We conducted interviews with stakeholders of the webpage, including our faculty members and the student community. From these interviews and discussions, we organized the information that will be included in the layout.
2. Once the information organisation was over, the persona for which we designed this webpage was finalised; for this, we kept our faculty’s inputs as the primary source.
3. The third and most time-consuming part of this project was data collection and content creation, as it required the delegation of tasks in teams and following up on the previous graduates.
Rough sketch of the information segregation.
Persona
Iteration I
Since we had very limited time on our hands, therefore we jumped right into the high-fidelity prototyping; we were a group of 16 students, and we designed 16 individual prototypes of the website and decided to deconstruct each of the layouts and pick and choose elements from them and utilise these different design direction to a common goal.
Initially, we called our website 16 as 16 bits of a raw file. Since we are a group of 16 students working on this website, it felt fitting especially given our magazine is called 12, and it started with a similar thought process. But later on, as we discussed with our faculty, it was suggested to drop the idea and go with a more formal approach.
Visually the prototype of the website represents the department well; it’s simple and sleek. But the interface design is too complex; it functions well while navigating the webpage on a laptop/big screen, but the same on a smaller screen, i.e. a mobile makes navigation far more challenging.
Simplifying certain aspects of the website can make the flow of the website more user-friendly. Once the 16 of us were done with our layouts, we came together and analysed the elements that worked for our goals. Henceforth, we decided on the following design directions.
Design Directions
-Very clear information structure & flow, simple and effective navigation system.
-Department name as the logo, only grey tones for background, Clean & legible typography.
-Simple, clean & effective UI.
Data Curation
Responsible for collecting data, i.e. student graduation projects, photographs, videos, and biographies.
Content Creation
Responsible for organising text for various sections for the ‘about’ page and editing and proofreading the bios sent to us.
UI/UX Team
Responsible for Visual/interface-related aspects of the design. Deciding the typography, colours, and UI elements.
Iteration II
Challenges so far have been to collect all the data from our department’s alums and have a standardised way of presenting their work on the platform; for that, we need to curate data. Another challenge was to correspond with various teams, such Data collection team, UI/UX team, and content writing team, and ensure a smooth workflow. Also, to make the website responsive for mobile.
Style Guide
The Product
In the final iteration, we started with the kinds of data we collected, video or photographs. After the UI/UX team restricted the information in the layout, keeping the challenge of standardisation of projects of all the graduates. In this iteration, keeping the website's responsiveness in mind, we also designed the mobile view of the website. The challenge in creating the layout for the mobile screen was not only the limited space but also the legibility of the content and doing justice to the various projects done in multiple formats, since all the projects are visual.
Landing Page
Ongoing Exhibition
Graduation Projects
Students Profiles
About Page
