Academy Mode

With the opening of the new Iovine and Young Hall at the University of Southern California in fall of 2019, the Dean of the Iovine and Young Academy felt it was an appropriate time to overhaul the schools web presence. It was the Dean's idea to split the website into two interfaces: standard mode and academy mode. Standard mode would reveal information in a fairly conventional, well designed fashion that would be easily accessible for all. Academy mode, on the other hand, would be a novel interface to information about the program that would challenge the visitor through puzzles to unlock the content. As a full time assistant professor at the academy with a concentration in data visualization and digital experiences, I was tasked by the Dean to create a number of proposals for what sort of web experience could be created to reflect the ideals of the Academy. I developed five different directions that we could go in and we ultimately landed on a combination of two ideas; one being a comprehensive network of students, their interactions with each other in classes, collaborations on projects, shared experiences in student organizations and workshops, and the other being a survey of prospective student interests to connect them with current and alumni students who had a similar academic focus. I took the lead in both visual and interaction design of the web experience. I developed ideas quickly on paper for rapid iteration and then converted them to realistic Adobe Illustrator mockups for translating ideas and design specifications to our development team. The final product was scaled back to a much simpler concept due to constraints applied to data acquisition and publishing. After the launch of the Academy Mode experience which must be accessed through discovery by completing an easter-egg puzzle on the front page of the site, I wrote an article about my design process which was accepted and published in Nightingale, the official journal of the Data Visualization Society.