This exercise was a chance to take Balsamiq for a spin and drive it like I stole it.
Good news is that Balsamiq is pretty easy to use and eliminates some annoying UI considerations that I unfortunately have gotten used to.

It does have a limited image library, byt the community at large is working swiftly to remedy that.

Exercise:
COLLECTIONS IN THE M.R29 SITE

Background –
M.Refinery29.com is a literal RSS-based mobile site that does not feature our full content offering, nor achieve significant engagement. It currently receives approximately 20% of all Refinery29 traffic, with a very high time spend browsing of about 4 minutes. Last month, it achieved 850,000 visits.
Anecdotally, we believe that m.refinery29.com is responsible for a significant proportion of new users to Refinery29, and we are therefore very keen to leverage this new organic audience, and keep them.

Refinery29 is growing, our new shop will be launched out next month and a redesign of the site is in the pipeline.

Exercise Requirement –
Include Collection pages to the R29 mobile site. Collection pages are theme-based curations, we will be launching 20-30 of these curated pages by the end of this year. These Topical pages will drive a lot of traffic as these tend to be seasonal and drive more engagement than any other index pages.

Design a hub for this section in mobile, to show its variety and at the same time help the user navigate between these various Collections pages. Feel free to change and design whatever you think is best. How do YOU envision Refinery29 in the future when looking at your mobile device?

Examples Of the Collection Pages:
http://www.refinery29.com/weddings
http://www.refinery29.com/street-style
http://www.refinery29.com/month-of-denim

UX wireframes (you can do these in balsamiq/ paper &pen )
– Design a hub of Collection pages that shows the various different collection pages: Weddings, Street-Style, Month-of Denim. Add features like filters to browse Collection pages by Category and Tags.
– Design a single collection page layout in mobile: choose one of the current collection page and optimize it for mobile. Use mobile design patterns to simplify the UI.

Bonus (an interactive prototype)
– Design a hub that shows the various different collection pages

Deadline:
You will have 2 days time to finish this and at the end of it, you will be presenting these concepts to our team.
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