Artifact 3: CDC Prototype - TWC 544 User Experience

TWC 544 was the first experience I had with the idea of "User Experience" or UI/UX design. This class was when I was first fully confronted with the threshold concept of considering the users needs for Technical Communication projects. Through my learnings in this course and completing the projects asked of me from this class, I realized that everything a technical communicator does is to help make a users life easier - whether that's through including a clear instruction manual, developing clear images to show a user how to do something, or testing many options for a website/phone application layout to be the most user friendly as possible. If a user has been unable to successfully navigate through the material that I've worked on, then I have failed to clearly communicate to them.

In this project we were tasked with analyzing the CDC webpage on overdoses and drug addiction, and then create suggestions for ways that it could be improved. This was a multi-step process where I first had to begin by testing the current site with several users to gauge what the biggest problem points were, and then I created the prototype attached here. This prototype provided a basic way of outlining what the site would look like and do, without fully developing and coding the site. This allowed me to further test the site with users to determine if the redesign was useful before dedicating the amount of time it would take to actually recreate the real webpage.

In completing this project I realized how useful prototyping can be in many situations, not just in website design. Using prototypes, or viewing my projects in that frame of mind, helped me to further consider my work from the users viewpoints, rather than my own frame of thinking and what I wanted to see and do. Analyzing other webpages helped me to learn that you can create materials that look nice and seem appealing, however, if the users can't navigate them effectively to find the information they need, what you've created is useless.

Murphy_Prototype of CDC Site Redesign.pd

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