The client
Nobel Laureate and MIT Professor of Finance, Robert Merton to redesign his website.
The project
Professor Merton travels frequently giving lectures and receives many inquiries about his work. His website needs to serve as a database where he can direct people to view his numerous papers, articles, and videos; something his old website wasn’t doing with it’s long list of materials.
Design challenge and approach
Structure became an important part of the design process and visual design. Not only did we need to organize dozens of publications and other medium, we needed to make it easily accessible and visually appealing. Because of this, the search function became the most prominent feature of the website, we even featured it on the homepage design. This function allowed us to sort Professor Merton’s work into three main categories, publications, videos and news, and then further filter them using topic, type, and year.
Behind every well designed website is an organized content management system, especially in a website such as this, where the administrator needs to be able to maintain a large number of documents. Since the client was maintaining themselves, it was important that they could easily add information to the backend. Thus, the three media type pages, news, publications and videos, were set up very similarly so that the client could simply fill in form fields for title and publication date as well as embed a video and select specific filters for topic and type.
Content heavy websites such as Professor Merton’s are always a challenge to design, they’re almost like infographics where information architecture becomes really important. You have to take a huge chunk of information, understand how users interact with it and look for it, then present it in a way that is clear and intuitive. The end result is so satisfying because now you have a functional, streamlined, beautiful, website and a happy client.
