Designer needed!

When launching our site as a beta a year ago, we adapted an off-the-shelf design for the design of the site. This has stayed in place ever since.

However, based on feedback over the last year, and our own experiences as both users of the site and as user interface designers, we know that it is not perfect.

As we move the site towards a full release, we are keen to have some redesign work done.

However, we only have a small grant of £600 (tiny, we know!) available for this, so if you are a designer who is keen to support what is a not-for-profit project by helping us out at this very low rate, please do get in touch.

Areas which we particularly want to address are:

• Making the map panel [e.g. see front page] bigger (possibly considerably so) – we have had a lot of feedback and it’s an increasing expectation.
• De-cluttering the Photomap screens [example], which have never had much design attention on them, and making the workflow here much more intuitive.
• Working out what to do about the itinerary page [example] which needs to be bigger and have less detail.
• Dealing better with the issue of how to represent three journey choices on the itinerary page.
• Potentially moving to a fluid width so that people who have a larger screen can use the space better.
• Reducing the boxyness of the design generally.
• Dealing with the question of whether it’s best to have a single big map and dispense with maplets altogether, or whether the maplets actually are useful to people [example – scroll down].
• Having things like nicely shaded buttons and UI widgets rather than the flat stuff we have everywhere.

Over the last month we’ve done a lot of work to reorganise the code to enable design improvements to be implemented more easily (particularly with the Photomap pages), so that page elements can be moved around more easily.

If you can help, please do let us know, including some links to your previous work – we’d love to hear from you.