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This deck of slides gives an overview of design goals & scope, user research, functionality and requirements.

The purpose of this project website is, on the one hand, to make deliverables and prototypes available for review and commenting to our users.

On the the other hand, the site provides a training ground for us. That is why we chose to build it from scratch using drupal, rather than using a wordpress blog or other hosted solution. Some of the functionality required by icarda.org will also be needed bt the users this site. I am concretely thinking of calender, RSS feed implementation, custom user profiles, knowledge base wiki, etc.

As we are building these features, we are learning how to implement and scale them for the larger site.

This is the place to come to for updates on the website re-design, reviewing project documentation and commenting on deliverables. 

An evolving demo site lives here:  http://beta.icarda.org

We are creating a series of progressively complex prototypes. These are being tested with users and continuously evolve during an agile development process. Each iteration of building and testing lasts two weeks.

1. Was a simple paper prototype. This first set of wireframes can be downoaded here.
2. The second prototype is the version we are currently testing. It is a set of clickable wireframes locking in some of the information architecture and suggesting some design options:  http://beta.icarda.org
3. The third prototype is based in FAO’s AgriDrupal tool and Johannes Keizer’s team installed a sandbox for us here: http://www.agro-pedia.org/agridrupal-ICARDA/ By implementing the functionality outlined in 2 on top of the already exisiting features of AgriDrupal, this will eventually become our new site.

Design Objectives:

Refresh homepage design
•Enable dynamic reuse of content by implementing CMS
•Develop templates to improve information design and assign content responsibility
•Improve information architecture and navigation
•Enable online collaboration (seamless, single log-in, secure)
•Improve and refine search
•Improve accessibility of website (AAA, mobile, low bandwidth, Arabic)