The starting point was to examine the existing Queerit website. I was able to quickly identify some areas for improvement within the design. One of the largest problems was that the landing and service pages were very long. It took a lot of scrolling to get to different pieces of information.

I researched popular design agencies looking for how they organized their information as I realized that would be a key part of the Queerit redesign. I also wanted to see how they highlighted their work and communicated their brand message.

Some common traits in these popular agency websites were not present on the Queerit website. One example of this was that the competitors portfolios of work were generally a main focus of their home page, with easy and appealing ways to look through the images, whereas on the Queerit website their portfolio was far down their homepage and had small imagery. Another element for most of the competitors was they incorporated mechanisms to make navigating the site simple and straightforward for users. Queerit needed to incorporate some of that simplicity to create user friendly navigation.

Completing user testing for the Queerit redesign was great because I could use their existing website to get clear information about the ways in which it wasn’t useable. I sought out users to test that were all interested in hiring a design agency. I received lots of good, specific information from these tests, especially from the contextual inquiry and task tests.

With user testing complete and the findings compiled and organized, I noticed there were a lot of commonalities among the users tested. I compiled a persona with these commonalities and referred to it often throughout the design process, which helped ensure that the user experience was at the forefront of the design.

Through the research stage it became clear that Queerit needed more pages and categories in order to make each page shorter and easier to understand. This meant determining the best methods for reorganization and categorization of information. In order to do so I created a sitemap to follow while designing the wireframes.

The Queerit stakeholders were provided with the deliverables I had presented as well as a few quick sketches of possible lo-fi wireframe templates. They were then able to give me more specific information and requests about what they wanted. For the landing page this included requests for vertical scrolling for viewing portfolio images, and a mosaic of the categories of services provided by Queerit. The services and contact us pages were chosen from the provided sketches without further alterations.

The logo, colour palette and fonts had already been selected by Queerit for their rebranding. The main task was to determine how the responsive navigation bar was going to look and behave. Queerit stakeholders requested that the top navigation not be seperate from the hero area on desk/laptop. In creating their site, the top navigation would change to a seperate bar as the user scrolled.

Queerit stakeholders played a large role in the decisions made that are reflected in the final wireframes, including having very little white anywhere and instead filling the majority of the whitespace with their brand colours. They requested lots of ‘blobs’ to saturate the headers, footers and for the landing page mosaic to be made of blobs. They also requested all scrolling to be vertical and for the top navigation to not be separated from the header.

After creating a clickable prototype for user testing, I was excited to see users interact with and improve the prototype. As with the last user test, only users that have considered web agency services participated. Users completed a task and looked through the prototype while I asked them questions.