Client
Class Project
Date Released
Spring 2016
Disciplines
Web Design
User Experience
Front End Development
Team Members
The Journal of Critical Incidents is an online archive that contains scholarly articles written by university professors and other experts in their field. Dr. Brotherton, a professor at Ferris State University, runs the Journal of Case Incidents website. Outdated, and not user friendly by any means, Dr. Brotherton came to us to design a more attractive, and more importantly, more usable website.
The main problem the site had was that it didn't have much content. With only one page, the only content the JCI site had was basic site information, and contact info to submit and review case studies. Without a way to properly upload, review, and keep track of who was reviewing what and when, the JCI website was very difficult to use for its intended purpose. Along with this, we were also passing our eventual designs to the seniors in the development program at the Grand Rapids Ferris campus. How do we create a usable, functional website, and how do we pass on our designs to be successfully built out by developers?
We interviewed Dr. Brotherton about who uses the website, and why. We concluded that it was him, the site administrator, and those in the academic field that write scholarly articles for different reasons: professors writing case studies to secure their tenure or experts writing about their academic research, and graduate students reading case studies to use in their own research.