BALTIMORE NEIGHBORHOODS INDICATORS ALLIANCE
BACKGROUND
The Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance (BNIA) is a nonprofit that collects, analyzes, and distributes large amounts of data about Baltimore City. Their reports and data are used by the media, grant makers and foundations, application developers, and community leaders.
WEBSITE PROJECT
BNIA needed to make its data much more accessible and user-friendly on its website (as opposed to relying on printed reports), increase user engagement with their key audience segments, provide guidance and assistance to users of the data, maintain the site simply and easily into the future, and do all this with a very small team and limited resources. In addition, as part of the University of Baltimore, they are required to harmonize their branding and look-and-feel with the established graphic identity of the university.
To help the group prioritize the site’s functions and requirements, I created user personas based on each major audience segment. I also considered the BNIA staff as “users” whose needs must be considered in the design, since they would be maintaining the site on a shoestring.
To help the group prioritize the site’s functions and requirements, I created user personas based on each major audience segment, to help BNIA visualize their audiences and prioritize content
By developing the IA in an interactive prototype form, with multiple annotations, I was able to show the clients how the site could be redeveloped in a CMS (WordPress), bringing the most timely and important information forward while maintaining the large archive of still-useful data further down in the hierarchy. This level of documentation also communicated the exact parameters of the site to the development and production team, who are then able to build the site quickly and with few questions.