Design Sprint 3: Retrospective

Public site

Part of our work has been asking 'what do people want from the CERN site' : curiosity is a big reason people from outside CERN visit. They want to know a little more about what is going on, on the inside, in terms they can understand.

We have spent some time researching what people understand about CERN, what they misunderstand about CERN and what questions they want answered. Now we are beginning to translate this into content that curious people can explore and experience – to give them a taste of what CERN is and does, and the exciting science that lies ahead.

A few weeks ago, we spent some time on-site at CERN talking through our approach, our audience and how we can create a site that meets their needs. I'm including a quick video here to explain our audience a little more and how we're mapping out the content for each audience group and walking you through our current prototype.

The current prototype is at http://www.markboultondesign.com/clients/c/cern/public/iteration2/index....

/user prototype

The public site is only part of our project. Another part is how we can make the /user part of the CERN website more useful, better organised and intuitive for the various people and organisations that use it. This last sprint we've conducted a high-level audit of all of the content under /user and defining it as 'informational' and 'functional'. The informational content is passively consumed; content you read. The functional content are web applications and services: search, calendars, booking meeting rooms etc.

Our next focus is creating a 'toolkit' of this functional stuff that is omnipresent throughout the site. It might be better to explain this in some sort of diagram.

All informational content for CERN users will be in a 'People' section and be publically available. That's the content that lives at the bottom in the shaded area. Once a user logs in, they have a toolbar with all of the functional tools in there as a sort of CERN dashboard. As long as you're logged in, this dashboard would be present across all website content – it will be a shortcut to how you book a meeting room, or quickly check your calendar. We're quite excited about this dashboard being adopted by CERN's developer community who could produce 'widgets' for other departments or experiments – really tailoring the web tools on a user by user basis.

It's early stages in the prototype development for this, but we're shooting for sharing one this week (Thursday 10 November).

Next design sprint focus:

1. Information architecture. We'll be delivering a top-level site map for the new public site.
2. Content & Labelling. The content team is busy getting together all the content needs for the site – and starting to commission content from various sources. We're working to integrate that content for the next iteration.
3. Design system. Following on from our initial explorations of the homepage, we'll be pushing this across various other pages to see how the design starts to take shape. We'll be applying the design to the prototype shortly in order to get some better user feedback.
4. Logistics. We're starting to ramp up our meetings with internal CERN departments to discuss the various logistic changes that may need to happen for the new site (for example: the live event feed, search, functional tools as 'widgets').

We believe that the story of CERN is rich and multi-faceted, from the smallest muon to the Large Hadron Collider, and the people that are inextricably linked to these experiments and discoveries are the most important part of all. Our next focus is to bring these stories to life on the site. We will need your help, your recollections and voices to collate them. Then we will mould them into something that communicates the wonder of what it is CERN is and does – its past achievements and its important place in the future of scientific research and discovery.