We recently finished the discovery phase of the\u00a0project to update our website.<\/p>\n
The discovery phase helped us build up a much clearer idea of the many business needs. We now have a good feel for\u00a0our users’ needs too.<\/p>\n
As a way of wrapping up the discovery phase and starting our alpha phase we decided to have a mood board workshop.<\/p>\n
Mood boards have long been used in design as a way to communicate the overall, well\u2026 mood\u2026 of the thing to be designed.<\/p>\n
They are as useful in web design as they are in interior design or\u00a0product design.<\/p>\n
Mood boards are great for rebranding exercises because they can help show stakeholders what the brand will feel like before it becomes a real thing.<\/p>\n
They are also useful as a tool for designers to help them think about and implement a brand.<\/p>\n
We found ourselves in this situation during our website theme discovery project. We have a University brand, but how exactly do we turn that into something real? How does that become a fresh and engaging new website?<\/p>\n
We gathered a group of 7 people from across the University\u2019s corporate communications, recruitment, web and user experience teams.<\/p>\n
Then we\u00a0printed out screenshots from a bunch of interesting websites, got a stack of web and design magazines, cut the whole lot up, and stuck the cutouts onto a series of boards.<\/p>\n
We also took the key themes of the brand and added them to the boards to remind us what we were trying to capture. These were things like: innovation, confident, intelligent, vibrant locations, passionate, engaging…<\/p>\n
The process of doing this was fun (therapeutic?!). It also helped us think about our corporate brand, and how that might or might not work in terms of meeting corporate objectives and user needs.<\/p>\n\n\t\t