Intro

Valley Stream is a village in Long Island, New York. Ranked as “the best place to live in New York” in 2017, it is a safe and diverse area, and is merely a train ride from New York City. While it is a great place to live, the official website has a long list of problems. For this project, the task was to redesign the homepage as well as revamping one user flow from the website. The pathway to the parks page was the chosen flow as it needed some modernization.

Problems

In the current design is that everything looks outdated. All of the hero images are blurry, the quick action icons do not match up stylistically.

Below the main landing, the space containing information is largely empty space being used inefficiently.

The actual parks page contains no information or pictures of any of the parks, making it ultimately useless.

Goals

With this redesign, the aim is to modernize the website. Getting rid of unnecessary information, reorganizing the navigation bar, adding new ways to get around the website, and adding more information to some places will greatly improve the helpfulness of the website for its users.

Comparative Analysis

The village of Lynbrook website has a more modern look overall. It has a defined color palette, the icons underneath the opening carousel are visually coherent, and the navigation bar collapse/expands based on where you are on the page.

The NYC website had a different approach to the navigation icons, replacing the line of icons with a grid of them instead. In addition, the boxy layout of the rest of the website works well in terms of organization and visual clarity.

The Raleigh residents website also has a coherent style, a modern look, and a good color palette. In addition, it has a vertical navigation bar, alongside a horizontal one holding additional information.

Pattern Collecting

The Switzerland tourism website used an interesting method of organizing their travel amenities, with a tab system to separate the different services.

Proposed Userflow

The proposed user flow for this project was navigating to the parks webpage. Simplifying the top navigation to be more concise and focused allows for the user to find things they are looking for much faster. In addition, reorganizing the location of certain pages makes for an improved user experience.

Moodboard

Though I started with three moodboards, ultimately only one made it far into the design stage. The other two felt uninspired and failed to produce very interesting designs.

Wireframes

Initially, the goal was to modernize the layout. This first wireframe rearranged the display of information on the homepage and got rid of the strange looking icons.

The next iteration included an events section on the front page, as that would be something people would check the website for.The Raleigh residents website also has a coherent style, a modern look, and a good color palette. In addition, it has a vertical navigation bar, alongside a horizontal one holding additional information.

Final Designs

The updated landing screen will only feature one high quality image with a search bar for added convenience. The icons have been replaced with simple buttons for visual cohesion with the rest of the website.

The news section now features articles, instead of empty categories. Organized in a grid format to save space, it also comes with a hierarchy that shows the most recent article at the top.

The events section has been fully fleshed out, with an interactible calendar that shows the events occuring on the day, and upcoming quick events on the bottom.

The parks page has information and pictures of each of the parks, as well a separate page for each park.This is some text inside of a div block.

Hometown Website Redesign

10 Weeks - Figma