One of the tasks that I took up during my usability fellowship with NCI was to work closely with the health communications team in our annual report to the nation. This is a report we release to the general public through both our existing website as well as social media such as Twitter.

As this was one of my first projects with the NCI team, I had to adapt a number of different methods I was used to for this organization. This included things such as adapting a Heuristic Evaluation Template towards the organization’s needs by combining it with a usability evaluation, and presenting information with an evidence-based approach that I had recently learned about from the Nielsen Norman Group. The other thing that I had to be aware of was a hard deadline, which meant I had to create a loose design cycle template in order to do several iterative drafts of three key features: usability, infographics, and information architecture.

As a result, I leveraged my wide range of specialties for this project: using graphic design skills I learned about in class, I helped redesign the infographics to have a clear and concise message. I also utilized usability evaluation methodologies to test the website and the arrangement of information. However, I got to learn something new with information architecture, especially as it related to social media: we had to arrange information on the page to not only make sense, but also create key sentences that could be sent out through twitter as tweetable links which would engage readers to click on the report and explore it further.