REI Engineering
Open source software and blog website
To gain a stronger presence among the engineering community, REI was interested in creating open source software and a blog for REI’s Engineering Team.
The thought was that by sharing articles and encouraging contributions, excitement would be generated amongst other engineers – it would also demonstrate the value of being part of a co-op and a passionate steward!
Responsibilities (shared): UX Research & Design
Methodology
To gain a better understanding of how engineering teams represent themselves and share their work with the public, a competitive analysis was conducted on many engineering and blog-based sites.
Before the design work began, a white-boarding session was conducted with the stakeholders, to ensure alignment on requirements and user flows.
Design
The REI Engineering Team didn’t have content for the site, so it was both a challenge and an opportunity to be forward-thinking when considering possibilities for their immediate needs as well as their future needs. For this reason, it was imperative that the design was scaleable.
A card design was utilized throughout the site to feature blog articles, projects, and events. These cards were used to highlight content, and they also provided the ability to be sorted, filtered, and commingled.
Image: Card designs for blog articles, projects, and events
Home page – Featuring a site introduction, ‘Featured’ articles, and projects, along with an events and jobs placement / Flow – To individual blog articles page:
Flow – From ‘Projects’ hub page to the individual projects GitHub page:
Contributor page – Featuring contributor’s profile, blog articles, and projects:
Flow – From ‘Events’ hub page to the individual event page: