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UI/UX Designer
You can find the indepth UX case study I wrote here.
My original interest in redesigning this site was primarily my love of Sarah J. Maas' work as an author and frustration with her site. With the site not being frequently updated and lacking in good sorting practices, I was eager to see how I would improve the overall user experience.
The first thing I noticed about the site is how plain it is. The site feels underwhelming for an author who creates such expansive fantasy worlds.
I did some user testing, and target audience survey's to find the best way to redesign this site.
The feature I felt most strongly about fixing was the navigation bar, and card sorting helped me the most here. I wrote down all the pages to the site and started regrouping them to figure out what pieces belonged where.
When it came time to really finalize the colours and design, I wanted to make something that really felt true to the author. Her current site is a black background with white text and a white nav bar. Though it's sophisticated, it’s extremely simplistic, which is not reflective of her writing.
I wanted the whole site to really reflect her writing and the depths of her novels.
Redesigning an author's site requires a good understanding of the author and their fan base. Books are a broad landscape filled with different niche user bases of all kinds. Authors create vast landscapes filled with innovation and imagination, and their sites—an extension of their art — should never reflect anything less than the beauty of what they create.