Introducing BNIM’s New Website
What a Website Does Matters as Much as How it Looks
Our practice embraces the understanding that what design does – how it engages people, implements high-performance solutions, and positively impacts communities — matters as much as how it looks. This is an integral part of what we do at BNIM. As we re-imagined BNIM’s new website experience, this same guiding concept held true. Our team envisioned and crafted an online presence for BNIM that is as highly functional, intuitive, and comprehensive as it is inspiring and beautifully designed. We’re so excited to share it with you.
Key Features You’ll Find:
Below are some key features visitors will find when exploring our new online space and connecting with our practice, projects, people, and library of resources. Let us know about your experience and feedback for our new website by clicking on the red icon bubble below.
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The Spine is the central navigation pathway of our website, serving as a guide and key reference point as visitors flow through and explore each landing page.
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As an employee-owned design company, we are a collective of innovative design practitioners and professionals who aim to inspire change and enhance the human condition. Explore our People page to connect with and learn more about our BNIM team members.
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The Make My Volume feature allows website visitors to curate their own downloadable PDF Volume of our projects and people.
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The Library offers a collection of books and videos serving as a window into BNIM’s work and culture. This resource showcases our projects, processes, and project types, providing an in-depth exploration of the principles that shape our practice.
The Design Process Behind BNIM’s Website Experience
Crafting Visitor Experience and Establishing Guiding Design Principles
BNIM’s talented website design team, with backgrounds in graphic design, research, user experience (UX), and content writing, worked in close collaboration with our website developer through every step of the design and development process to thoughtfully craft our new site architecture and visitor experience.
Our team’s process began with a robust research phase, which involved gathering data, conducting internal surveys, and hosting focus and test groups to understand how to create a more functional, inclusive, and intuitive user experience. This research was important in guiding our website design and establishing five guiding design principles:
Ubiquitous access: Prioritizing a base menu and advanced search bar that can be accessed from anywhere on the website.
One Click Away: Providing navigation pathways and ease of connection to key related information and BNIM point of contacts on each page.
End to the Endless Scrolls: Page navigation that guides visitors through web pages without the use of long scrolls.
Effortless Flow: Clickable links interwoven throughout the website for an immersive and productive experience.
This is BNIM: Designing an experience that feels at once comfortable, easily navigable, beautiful, and distinct to BNIM.
The Spine — A Focal Point for Function
With the goal to create one integrated and innovative design solution that would align with our guiding design principles and address the full scope of user experience needs while inspiring curiosity, our team developed the main design concept of the “Spine.” True to its name, the design element of the Spine operates as an integral, flexible center of function and support that creates an immersive website experience.
The Spine uniquely appears as the center of each page when activated, in lieu of traditional sidebars. It is designed to be both a starting point and a continuous touch point that provides ubiquitous access and an effortless flow of navigation for the visitor.
Whether one wants to pinpoint a search or move through our website with ease, our enhanced multi-modal navigation allows visitors to explore different areas of BNIM’s practice through suggested content pillars or find specific information using our website’s AI-powered search bar. Each landing page presents new navigation pathways, intuitively providing links to connected pages or related content to make visitors’ search experience more seamless.
Meet the Team
Beena Ramaswami, Project LeadMallory Fergason, Design LeadKate Kovarik, Content LeadMalta Olhiser, Content DeveloperBalthazar Kaufmann, Website DeveloperNatalie Gaydar, UX ProfessionalRita Wang, UX TestingEmily Herndon, Content DeveloperJames Baker, Content DeveloperAnne Carlson, Content Migration