William Key

Our Approach

As the UX Lead, I collaborated with the Project Manager, two Visual Designers, two Front-End Developers and with the IARPA Public Affairs Officer.

We kicked off the project by meeting with IARPA Public Affairs to understand IARPA’s mission, target audiences, grant processes, and objectives for the site. In learning more about their objectives, I observed that their site had an internal focus that seemed to conflict with their stated primary focus on researchers.

To demonstrate to IARPA that their site was internally-focused in content, language, and structure, I co-led a workshop session with key leadership to review their grant process from an outside-in perspective and led them to agree their site was more focused on their own internal processes. This realization won us their buy-in for designing a more researcher-focused site.

Government constraints around public research meant we couldn’t interview target users, but IARPA staff assured us they had close working relationships with their target users, so we relied on a co-design session with internal stakeholders to map out a new site design to better address grant-seekers’ needs. I created a sitemap to reflect the new information architecture to confirm stakeholders' expectations for the outcome of the workshop.

Given the new structure, I completed a content inventory and created wireframes for a new site layout and content organization. (Five example pages shown below)

I continued to collaborate on the site design throughout the visual design and development, including working through technical constraints that forced us to adapt the design. (Three example pages shown below)

I then conducted usability testing with staff to validate the site still met the needs of IARPA’s internal users, and based on the results, we refined the design slightly to address additional grant processing task flows.