User Experience Research & Website design project

We are looking for a short-term partnership (with the possibility for additional future partnerships) with a user experience strategist who is comfortable working with us to conduct stakeholder interviews & initial goal setting research with clients, as well as creating information architecture & user experience designs based off that research. This is for a website design project that will be built on top of an existing website design platform. Our ideal partner is interested and able to help craft IA & UX that promote user engagement and is comfortable brainstorming & collaborating on strategy. We expect this work to involve a 12 week overall effort: * 4 weeks at about 10hr/week of research & strategy, * 4 weeks at a more intense 20hr/week effort for the design period, * 6 weeks of light Q&A and refinement time at about 4-8hrs/week. Our client operates primarily on US East time, I myself am out in San Fran, so on pacific time. We're looking for a partner who can do the occasional east coast meetings that are client-facing and willing to primarily work till pacific close of business. We were fully remote before the pandemics, and have a pretty time tested process for remote work/coordination. The project itself is a really interesting one. We've been asked to help redesign a website for a US think tank focused on helping the public determine the veracity of visual media & identifying propaganda from governments. They're one of the leading open-source intelligence groups focused on helping detect when imagery or video has been doctored by state actors for propaganda, and help contribute to public knowledge about what is true or verifiable in many cases. Their current website has mostly been a brochure site, with much of their content being created on Medium or on their parent organization site. The new website should highlight their high quality visual & video content, and help them tell the story of their research in an engaging and authoritative way. There will be some interesting taxonomy challenges as well, as they need both an academic taxonomy for research content, and an easier to access and more general user focused taxonomy to work in harmony on the new website. This is an opportunity for them and us to build a really compelling storytelling website that can highlight more of their work. Their audience includes both journalists, academics, and government policy folks, so less focused on the day to day citizen in terms of delivering their work, but they still want their work to have an emotional impact. We will be building the website on a multi-site platform we built for the client with Wordpress as the core CMS technology. We work in small agile teams with a PM, strategist, UX/Business Analyst, technical lead, and often a visual designer attached. All design work must be completed using Figma, and must make use of symbols, variables, and components. Highly organized and structured Figma file hygiene is a must. (And demonstration of this is a key hiring criteria.)