To complement the project developer team we have web designer Ben Hayes on board to help us develop our designs for the Visualising China tool. Stuart Church, our user experience consultant, gave invaluable help earlier in the project to develop our description of Visualising China’s target audience. Our primary target audience is UK academic researchers, with several other secondary audiences, the main ones of these being UK learners (in schools, colleges or Universities) and members of the public – in particular genealogists.
Using knowledge of who the intended target audience are, we then held a consultation meeting with stakeholders, facilitated by Ben who has come up with the first general design for Visualising China:
Mockup of the new overall design for Visualising China
Ben writes “I took Andy Degg’s excellent original design as a starting point and tried to give it a slightly more modern, high-tech feel, since the new project is more of an interactive tool, rather than an exhibition. The result is a balance between the historical nature of the subject matter, and the fresh, modern feel of a web application”.
Ben emphasises that this is not meant to be a complete visual design for the web application, but is to assist us in working on the branding for the Visualising China tool. Eventually the finalised visual design may have a different layout to this.
Great work Ben, thanks! Now over to the developers to implement it …