The Machine That Goes Ping

http://themachinethatgoesping.com/
Personal project

My Role: Information architect, theme developer
When I recently redesigned my personal blog, I figured I may as well use all the fancy book-learnin’ I’d been acquiring. Taking advantage of a long weekend over summer break, I researched blogs of both graphic designers and information architects to learn what the common terms, features, and level of sophistication were. I sketched out a quick wireframe in Axure, spiffed up the final design in PhotoShop, and then coded up a theme in WordPress.

Site comparison matrix: Personal and portfolio site comparisons (PDF; 49KB)
Wireframe: Home-wireframe (PDF; 49KB)

A Taxonomy of IT Documents

UW MSIM – IMT 530 final project

My Role: Taxonomist
For this class project, I designed a taxonomy of documents on an intranet. I created a mind map to sort the candidate terms, plotted out the taxonomy in an Excel spreadsheet, and created an authority control document.

Mind Map: Galera vocab (PDF; 624KB)
Taxonomy: IMT530B Final – Maxwell (Excel; 168KB)
Final report: IMT530B-FinalPaper-Maxwell (PDF; 146KB)

Express Checkout

UW MSIM – IMT 540 final project

My Role: User experience researcher; designer
The Express Checkout project was an exercise in redesigning the IT equipment checkout process at Herrera Environmental Consultants. The point of the exercise was to understand context and flow, to create a paper prototype, and to test the design on actual users. IMT 540 was a design methods class, and this was my final project.

Report: Express Checkout (PDF; 5.1MB)

The Louverture Project

http://thelouvertureproject.org/
Privately-funded project

My Role: Researcher/historian; information architect
I developed this wiki before I had any formal training in Information Architecture, so I was experimenting directly on the page, without researching or developing artifacts. There are certainly things I would change, but I still basically like how the home page turned out, with different views of the same material arranged for people with different information needs.