Building websites is complex.

For a lot of nonprofits and businesses, the process could seem time consuming, frustrating and sometimes painful.

We like to turn that idea on its head. We dont think it has to be that way. In fact, we think the process can be insightful, engaging, creative and dare I say, fun?

Last week, we collaborated with the Chicago Youth Voices Network (CYVN) to design a number of workshops for the summer. These workshops were designed to incorporate youth and other leaders in the process of developing blueprints for a social network website for active youth across the city of Chicago to promote civic engagement and participation.

Who better than to help write the plans for this site than the youth who will use it? We used collaborative design methods to map out user Personas and created storyboarded User Narratives to gather insights about who we wanted to attract to the website and how we see them using it.

Fun!

All the assets developed in the workshop helped us understand who influence youth to register, what content they are looking for, what they expect the site to do and how we as designers and developers should prepare for these things.

One thing’s for certain (at least from the Personas developed in the workshops), youth will be coming to this site with their headphones MP3s and videos anyone

Are you looking for a process to help redesign your website? Become our client!