It’s a great place to find information on different types of automotive sports offered in the DC metropolitan area. Some of these automotive sports include Club Racing, Solo (Autocross), Time Trials, Road Rally and Rallycross.

The Washington DC Region’s website is not bad, but could be improved with a stronger focus on information architecture and visual hierarchy. The navigation, particularly needs a cogent sense of organization. The visual design is also heavily dated and would benefit from an update. In this case study I will attempt to improve this website by addressing a few of these issues.

The Issues

One issue I’ve always had with this website was the navigation. Sometimes looking for information across this site can be an enigma. There are no indicators that a link might take a user offsite or reveal a sub navigation. Many of the links could be combined to reduce confusion. For example, About the Region and Region History do not necessarily need to be two separate pages. These pages could be placed under a larger category clearly labeled About Us.

In addition to combining links, the different automotive genres should be separated or at least have greater hierarchy. This is important as it helps define the purpose of this homepage which is essentially showing the automotive sports offered in the DC metropolitan area.

The welcome/introduction statement is nice, but it’s value doesn’t warrant the amount of real-estate it’s currently occupying. This section could possibly be removed or demoted to a lower area on the page. Moreover, the “2011 Season Schedule” and “Upcoming Events Calendar” sections should be combined. The 2011 Season Schedule adds additional functionality to the event calendar, but it’s disjointed and carries the user to another page.

The Redesign

For my proposed solution, I wanted to add excitement and impact to the site. To do this I used photos taken by automotive enthusiast in the DC metro area. Some of the photographs are extremely good and it would be a crime not to use them for the site. Once selecting an image to establish a tone, I turned my attention to restructuring the navigation.

The navigation is simplified and split into two groups. The first group contains the usual utility items while the second contains the different automotive sports. An icon is used to represent each sport and is accompanied with text to explain the genre. By setting these items apart, the design has a stronger focus on directing the user to a specific place. The Event Calendar has also been tweaked and now includes a filter to list events by category. Users will no longer have to dig into the subpages to filter the event calendar.

As usual these case studies are merely a personal exercise and to perform a real redesign would require extensive research and information from the client.