Blog

One of the hardest challenges in web design is creating a design that effectively meets the needs of a business's diversified customer base. 90% of the time, a business targets several audiences, all of whom want to do something different on the site.

So how do we go about prioritizing these various tasks that our customers want to perform? And how does this inform the design?

Creating Personas

My name is Garret Voorhees and I'm a new Senior Designer here at Chapter Three. I come from the world of print, with a BFA in Graphic Design and MS in Print Media from the Rochester Institute of Technology. My graduate studies concerned the experience of reading in digital formats, and especially in web browsers. Through all of this, I never touched Drupal and only had a vague sense of its abilities as a web platform.

Pushtape is a Drupal-based music publishing project I've been working on. It is currently under active development.

Design goals:

• easily publish a discography with albums and tracks
• simple admin interface
• extendable, minimal framework using existing web technologies

The project is in its very early stages, but I wanted to share with you how we got here and why I believe building this piece of software is important.

I'm always on the lookout for usable websites while browsing the internet, and for archiving, I use the online bookmarking site Pinboard. The three tags I use most frequently for organizing these links are 'Resource', 'Reference', and 'Inspiration', and though I categorize each of them with a different tag, they're all well-designed and straightforward experiences with easy to accomplish goals for the end user. I'd like to show you some specific examples and highlight what makes each site successful in their usability.