Katarzyna Tadaszak
We’ve all heard of it, but we’ve never encountered it in the wild before – the ideal client who presents us with the purpose of the project without defining the means of communication. We want to show what the work of an architect accustomed to the client looks like – “I know how it should look”, when it comes to facing “I know what the goal is”. We will perform an analysis of a real case that was a surprise to us in our daily routine. Working mainly with institutional clients and small businesses, our team is used to facing projects where the objective is blurred and even obscured by expectations of the visual layer. It was a pleasant, but also stressful, change to work with someone who knows what goal they want to achieve and openly admits that they don’t know how to do it. The only limitation for us was to work in a multi-web environment with a predefined layout. Here, the layout of the subpages can be modified, but the colour palette, the header layout and the appearance of the content blocks are clearly defined. Working on the project is similar to building with Lego bricks; we have components we can use, but the focus is on communicating information clearly and engagingly to the user. In the presentation, we will show our design path, ways in which the finished website components can be used in client work and usability research. We will show our efforts – successes and mistakes – on the way to building an effective information architecture that serves the client’s stated goals.