Timeline
12 weeks
(June 2023 -
August 2023)
Skills
User research
Information architecture
Project Overview
The Human Services Coalition (HSC) is a nonprofit dedicated to enhancing the delivery of health and human services in the Tompkins County area. As the sole designer, my goal was to redesign HSC’s website to effectively communicate their mission and enhance user discoverability.
The Problem
HSC’s website serves as an information hub, accessed by the community often in times of emergency and distress. However, the information is hard to find and not easily accessible.
The Goal
How might we increase information accessibility for community residents, staff, and partners?
The Solution
With the redesign, I optimized the website’s navigation and categorization system to improve information accessibility and streamline long-term maintenance.
Advocating for User Research
Because I was working for a nonprofit with a limited budget and working on a project with a strict timeline, conducting extensive user research was initially met with uncertainty due to concerns about resource allocation and time constraints. I recognized that the most impactful redesign would be driven by incorporating the voices of those that would be impacted by said design. However, the challenge was conveying the importance of user research to a team individuals with a non-technical background.
I devised a streamlined user research plan that focused on high-priority audiences. I identified the three main user groups of the HSC website: community residents, staff, and board members. I eventually moved forward with interviewing community residents and staff, as board members refer to the website less frequently.
Diving Deeper Into the Problem
My goal from speaking with community residents and staff were to uncover the pain points they faced when accessing information online. I wanted to understand what confused users and what groups of information were hard to find.
I categorized the findings according to the themes users mentioned most frequently. During the interviews, I had asked both community residents and staff to complete a specific set of tasks - most of the tasks focused on accessing specific pieces of information or a service.
55%
of users were unable to complete the tasks successfully.
75%
of users did not follow the happy path.
When completing these tasks, I asked community residents and staff to take me through their thought process and verbalize any emotions and opinions they had. It became clear that users both familiar and unfamiliar with the HSC website had difficulties accessing information.
“I don’t like when information is buried.”
“Right now, things are broken down as if people have to know where things are already to find them.”
“I don’t like pages that you can only find if you know what other pages to click on.”
It became clear that users both familiar and unfamiliar with the HSC website had difficulties accessing information.
Organizing Mass Amounts of Information
With HSC’s current layout, users were struggling to access the information they need quickly and easily. As the first step of the redesign, the most urgent issue was organizing such a large amount of information in a way that is easily understood and accepted.
With feedback from community residents and staff, I started iterating on how the information on the website should be structured. After brainstorming, I decided it would be best to create a navigation system based off information categorized by either target audience or topic.
Categorizing information based off intended audience had the possibility of being too limiting - especially when community residents encapsulate a diverse need of goals. With this navigation, new users would have to categorize themselves as either a non-profit representative, a community resident, or staff before beginning to understand the resources HSC has to offer each group. New users would also struggle with finding information they need quickly as they don’t know which resources are being allocated to each audience.
By organizing information according to topic, users would be able to find what they needed efficiently. In the proposed navigation, information is presented to the user according to the topic. It was important to consolidate information so that only the most important and necessary pieces of information were displayed to the user in an effort to avoid information overload.
Market Research
HSC’s branding guide hadn’t been updated since it was initially design and built 10+ years ago. As part of the redesign, it was an exciting opportunity to refresh the non-profit’s design system to ensure that all of the visual design elements aligned with the organization’s mission and values.
I referenced websites of non-profits with similar missions to see what visual design elements I wanted to incorporate or avoid.
HSC's Refreshed Look
To cater to community residents who may be in a stressful situation, the website needed to be friendly, welcoming, and simple. The goal of the redesign was to make information as easy to access as possible without overwhelming users. To do so, the new design system had to reflect this.
Learnings From My First UX Design Internship!
This was my first UX design internship! I undoubtedly learned so much about developing skills as a designer to how non-profits operate! My hope, as a designer, is to be able to leverage technology to create social good. This was an invaluable opportunity for me to do just that!
As the sole designer on this website redesign project, I initially struggled with communicating and explaining design decisions. This was the first time I was working directly with stakeholders and receiving feedback from individuals who were unfamiliar with the design process. When creating the project timeline, I had the opportunity to advocate for the importance of user research. By addressing the concerns of stakeholders and understanding their perspectives, I was able to explain why this process was so important and how it would influence the final design. Through practice, I was able to elaborate on design decisions which allowed me to gain confidence in myself and deepened my own understanding of design!
