Projects

River Valley Orthodontics is an updated website for an already existing Orthodontics practice that has recently updated their office and needed to also update their dated website.

I was assigned to this client to solve for a website design that really highlights their updated office while advertising the new services they offered. I looked to design their website with a focus on the services they offered in a condensed manner to avoid information overload.

Great! We figured out which lights are broken and which lights work and got some new lights to decorate our tree with!

From my research in regards to their older website and other competitors within similar industries as well as prior experience now designing Orthodontic websites I had reached the following conclusion:

• Drop down menus had to be removed due to the poor navigation hierarchy it created

• Information burden to the user was heavy and unnecessary in all cases, especially the highly technical detail most clients initially wanted to put in

• Micro-animation and movement were added to improve the flow 'below the fold' and "explorability" of the website

• Condensed navbar to show only the needed information until after the information in requested, and only then display it in full

Synthesising the research I came to the conclusion the update from older website to new required a few things that were observed. One was the condensation of the information that was on the website. Second was hiding information that was required but on initial view may have been too much burden on the user unless requested. I see the conclusion of the research being that the website needed to be streamlined and information compressed into something anyone visiting the website can ingest easily.

This project had a short design to deployment time and so my design time was cut a lot shorter than was initially proposed. First few things to resolve were the navigation bar drop downs which were converted from a menu with hidden drop downs and multiple tertiary pieces of information to only primary pieces of information and no drop down. Next was to clean up the general density of the copy that made parts of the website too hard to focus and read and convert it into a smaller copy that only relayed necessary information. Seeing the old website had issues where information would disappear on the 'fold' a lot of the time I added some animations at section breaks and over mouse hovers to increase discoverability. Lastly I looked at the nav bar to show the information only when needed but otherwise hide most of it unless needed. This was done by condensing the nav bar once you scrolled down and then increase it back to it's full size when you scroll up.