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Portfolio / UxD The designs produced by Pylon Studios always focus first on how a site is structured, how visitors move through it and interact with it. The structure that we develop aids in creating the copy, designing the interface and the look & feel. All projects start with organizing the content into a taxonomy, developed into a site flow chart and wire frames. If additional interactive elements are required they are described to help both client and team members visualize the site before it's designd and produced. The UxD resume for JP Collins is available for download here. Case Studies Barclays Global Investors Market Track interface In 1997 Pylon Studios was brought in to redesign the Barclays Global Investors web site and later to add a component called Market Track. This component was more than just a stock market chart on the home page. Read more in our case study Century Benefits Century Benefits, a benefits consulting company for small and medium sized businesses needed a marketing site but also had a lot of different types of information to distribute to clients and potential clients. Pylon Studios produced a site that provided a way to promote the business through standard body copy and images but also short cuts to specific items like a downloadable brochure or a benefits calculator on all public-facing pages. Additionally, a section of the site was planned where clients could log in and download documents that were previously sent to them by post. The extensive site architecture documents we developed for this project described what the purpose of each page was, the interaction involved, the part of the site each page represented as well as the structure of the site, that section and the information flow throughout. Century Benefits was able to save time and money in preparing packets of benefits documents and on postage. Clients were able to save time and download what they needed when they needed. The rest of the site allowed Century Benefits to market their services and provide useful information to potential clients. See Site & Page Level Architecture Document Century Benefits web site Savantis Group An SAP consulting and reseller to the retail industry, Savantis Group came to us for help in designing an attractive and functional new web site. We provided a new design and a Content Management System (CMS). Read more in our case study Valencia Green web site Valencia Green was a financier for green building projects and green upgrades, such as loans for solar panels on a home. The client wanted to be able to promote the business, educate customers about green building and promote events and information seminars that they sponsored or produced themselves. To do this they asked for features like a calendar to list events as well as other green building related events, a community page and a gallery to display photos from the events. Read more in our case study Blue & Gold Fleet Blue & Gold Fleet is a destination company that operates ferry boats that at the time of the project took visitors to Alcatraz Island. Pylon Studios was asked to update the existing site. The task besides branding the look and feel, was to improve the user interface for buying tickets online. However, once we dug in we realized that there were many more tour packages than Alcatraz and Bay Cruises. Read more in our case study Other Examples Photographer's Cause web site Karen Ande is an American photographer and has been chronicling the AIDS epidemic and its effects on children in sub-Saharan Africa since 2002. I worked with her through the San Francisco Small Business Development Center. The biggest challenge we had was understanding how to organize the images. We decided to provided two collections. One in a portfolio of images focusing on a specific group of adults or children effected by AIDS, and a collection of projects Karen has helped raise money for. Despite the separation of content, the layout and navigation remained the same in each collection of images. See Site & Page Level Architecture Document UML Sequence Diagram and Use Case Scenario During my work with interactive agency Extension 11 in 2000, I worked with the programming staff to develop internal documents using Unified Modeling Language (UML) visual diagrams. We felt that the document format given to us in our training lacked enough clarity and that we could improve on them for our needs. We always produced a Use Case Scenario in text form to outline and describe the actions that took place for each process. However, one of the innovations that we found useful for our needs was to include some of the key actions in the scenario on the same document as the sequence diagram. This better allowed us to use the document as a one page reference tool and see at-a-glance the context of the diagram. If we needed more detail we could reference the accompanying text-only page with the entire scenario. See a sample Sequence Diagram and Use Case Senario document B to B web site Flow Chart Using Information Design Aproach In 1999 and 2000 I was working with a variety of approaches to site level information architecture documents. Each web site documented contained several pages. One page represented an overview of the entire site and each section of the site was documented on its own page. All pages displayed details in text, the navigation flow, a site structure thumbnail and what particular part of the site is being described on that page. Often these pages contained a screen level schematic to describe the content and navigation layout. The example provided is for a small site. However, this system can work for large or small sites and can provide as much detail as needed. See Site & Page Level Architecture Document
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