In October 2010 I was invited back for the third time by the very modern and relaxed guys at Naked Communications to reprise my role (again) as information architect for Nokia's online sustainability offering.
Building upon the prior work that I did on the environment section, this was a more ambitious attempt to combine the online environmental and sustainability offerings (which should never have been separate in the first place at all of course). As before, the scale of the challenge is daunting: the whole user experience of the Nokia website is just embarrassing, with elderly and creaking IA patterns everywhere, an impoverished visual language, and a graphic design that belongs in the Dark Ages. If the quality of design evident on their website is anything to go by, no wonder they're their stock is falling...
Anyhow. The challenege is really that piece-meal change (section by section, as I was being asked to do) just will not cut it. The whole site needs a major overhaul, because the usability and design problems are profound and site-wide. Navigation, use of real estate and page-level IA, visual language, taxonomy, hero devices and promos, all of it needs replacing. So in offering design solutions for the sustainability section, I was also offering design solutions for the site as a whole.
I think I succeeded, too well perhaps: the client really liked the ideas I was putting forward, but realised at the same time that they couldn't implement the designs for the sustainability section whilst the rest of the site was sat locked in embarrassing 20th century design amber...
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