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McGraw-Hill Education:
AccessScience Web Site
Even a successful online resource like AccessScience, McGraw-Hill's online Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, benefits from periodic review, user-testing, and enhancement. Four years after its initial launch, McGraw-Hill asked Dynamic Diagrams to redesign the AccessScience interface based on several clear objectives: address known branding concerns, make the site's navigation more efficient, and meet the changing expectations of the site's users.
The Challenge: Update an Interface while Minimizing Development Costs
McGraw-Hill wanted to update the AccessScience interface with as little impact on the site's back-end programming as possible. Any extensive changes to the scripts that built the site's pages would dramatically increase the cost of the redesign.
One key issue, for example, was whether we could abandon the HTML frames used by the old design and better integrate global and contextual links on each page. This definitely affected back-end programming, but how much? Was the benefit worth the cost? These were questions we had to answer for every change.
Our Solution: Prioritize on Design Impact and Efficient Implementation
By analyzing the existing site, talking to McGraw-Hill staff, and interviewing users, we identified a strongly supported set of improvements to the interface. As our ideas coalesced, we met with the site's technology vendor to estimate development costs, then reviewed the results with McGraw-Hill to determine the optimal set of design parameters.
After additional review and two rounds of user testing, we delivered an interface design that required only minor changes to the site's existing information architecture. The new design streamlines site navigation, updates the site's branding, and meets the slow, steady maturation of user expectations.
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