When defining “design” for the undergraduate classes I teach, I usually boil it down to this: design is problem solving. In placing this definition into practice we first must define the problem – e.g. a client wants more customers, a website wants more visitors, a band wants more people to come to their show, an organization wants people to stop wasting resources. After the problem has been truly defined, the next step is to decide whose problem you are solving, and it is here that things get a bit more complex, because the number of stakeholders are usually plentiful and varied.

In working on design and maintenance of the websites I do for the Student Innovation Fellowship – SIF, Edge, Teaching Atlanta, The Hoccleve Archive, etc. – I have tried to bring the rudimentary design thinking above to the discussion of how to design and create the architecture of the sites. Many of these sites act as repositories for information about a given program or project and thus reflect the organization of the given program or project: the logic of how things are organized is the logic of those participating in the project or program.

This is not different than many of the corporate clients that I have worked with over the years. For example, many newspaper websites still have a section and navigation button for “Living” because that is a section that traditionally appeared in their print product. In print, you had a clear indication of the type of content available within the section because as many as 7-10 stories could be highlighted on the front page. On the website, there is little indication of the type of content lying behind a navigation button with the “Living” label. Users familiar with the print product would likely find the button useful, but many users of news sites do not read (or have ever read?) the print product, so to them the “Living” navigation button may have little use or meaning.

“Living” sections generally were a newspaper negatively-defined section: i.e. content that didn’t fit into Sports, Business, Opinion, Metro sections, etc. In the “Living” section you would find information on family life, the arts, style, health, and more. When translating this content to the Web, most newspapers have moved toward housing this varied content under sections titled more explicitly: arts, style, health, etc – rather than placing it under the ambiguous “Living” silo. Newspapers have seen the need to meet their users, their audience, where they are – which is mostly at a screen – creating taxonomies and architectures that anticipate the user’s need to find information and content that is pertinent to them.

When approaching the re-design and re-architecture of the various SIF sites I am involved with, I have started the process by discussing with the program/project team what the internal goals of the project and site are. However, we quickly have to move to discussing audience: Who is the desired audience? Who is the likely audience? What are their needs? What would we like to tell them?

Implied in these questions is a dialogue: what does the team want, and what does the user want? As I described at the beginning of this piece, this gets to the heart of all design projects: developing, understanding and balancing the dialogue between organizational needs/desires and the audience’s needs/and desires. It’s an ongoing and iterative process and it starts with all of us considering who is the audience for the work we are doing.

So who is the audience for your projects? What would you like them to know? What type of information consumer are they? How could we be better at meeting their needs and expectations?

This is just a start, but I would love to hear from any and all of you about your projects and how I may help you tell the story of those projects to an audience.