YWCA

OVERVIEW

YWCA website is cluttered and unorganized. There is a large amount of information that’s needed and there’s no organized structure or layout that helps users find what they’re looking for.

There is lack of clarity throughout the site and a quantity of tabs in the main site navigation. There is also a lack of knowledge on the user base that currently uses the site.

ROLE :
Literature research, User research, Wireframe

TIME & DURATION:
One semester (2017)

TEAM:
Kaela Disney,

PROBLEM SPACE

YWCA USER STRUGGLING WITH A CLUTTER SITE

Current YWCA Great Lafayette site.

USER PAIN-POINTS

"It is unclear what to click in order to locate information on the website...”

This is a quote we take away from our interview participants. She is a mother of 2 children, and her kids have been attending ywca's children's program for a long time. When we interviewed her, she mentioned that every time she searched for relevant course information and time through the website, she always seemed to lose herself in the process of operation, and finally she had to come to the office building to complete all the tasks by herself.

SPECIFIC SITE ISSUES LEAD TO THEIR STRUGGLES

1. Information from Navigation bar is cluttered.

2. Individual page Information is unorganized

2. Not able to process monetary donation.

OUR GOAL

A more organized, structured, and informative site

Imagine that every day you need to find the information in an unorganized and messy archive. It might takes hours for you to find them, if you get lucky. since it’s totolly possible for people to quit in the middle of the process.

How can we find the information we need better and more efficiently? Organization is the most important step. At the same time, the effective classification of information can better speed up the process. Ywca’s website faces the same problem just like this room. Therefore the re-design of the site aim on to re-categorize the overall information structure of the pages to bring users a clearer, organized and informative browsing experience.

CONTENT AUDIT

6 pages need to be merged, and 9 pages need to be condensed/edit, and 4 pages needs to be deleted.

Our aim was to collect and sort the current content on the YWCA site and uncover the content that is effective on the site, gaps where content must be created or merged, and identifying areas in which content is out of date or no longer useful for the users.

After quantifying the data we found that many of the pages were empty, redundant, or could be merged, as well as content just being out of date. The content audit was the first step in a team internal evaluation and it helped direct us into our next method of research which was a heuristic evaluation.

HEURISTIC ERRORS

87 usability errors, 41% of those violates aesthetic errors, 36% violates consistency errors, 8% were mismatched between system status errors.

We want to use Heuristic Analysis to understand, What are the main issues with the YWCA website? Which elements of the interface are most confusing to the user? Are there any major design and usability issues? How can these issues be addressed to enable a greater user experience? Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics

CARD SORTING

Research method used to help design or evaluate the information architecture of a site.

In a card sorting session, participants organize topics into categories that make sense to them and they may also help you label these groups.)

We wanted to use card sort was to help us understand users' expectations and understanding of your topics. We performed an open card sort where participants are asked to organize topics from content within the YWCA website into groups that make sense to them and then name each group they created in a way that they feel accurately describes the content. We used an open card sort to learn how users group content and the terms or labels they give each category.

COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Other primary websites have aesthetic site layout, consistent site elements, updated content, and clear brand identity.

One of the first steps in our research process was to assess different YWCA websites nationwide and identify areas that work well for those websites as well as frustrations and usability errors that we can potentially fix for the YWCA of Greater Lafayette. Our primary comparatives were the YWCA of Houston, YWCA of New York, and the YWCA of USA.

WIREFRAMES + BLOCKFRAMES

We came up various sketches based on the four layouts we brainstormed together. Each follow criteria and theme based on the four sites we looked at before. These sketches are very low fidelity and serve as a starting point as we begin reflecting and pushing towards a more digital representation.

We then transformed them into block-frames/wireframes, which is the method to emphasize the the structure of the body content.

It was especially important for us to figure out how the content should be laid out in terms of how we reflected it in the layouts we initially made.

SOLUTION

We provide to the YWCA prototypes that they could use to guide their process in redesigning their sitE

The prototype is a fully functioning interface developed using Adobe XD. It is to show an exact replication of what the website should look like live. A link at the end of this section will be available to preview the prototype online to show interconnectivity between pages.
(Click the picture to play with the prototype)

USABILITY TESTING

Usability tests show users like the new design, and think content are much better organized.

To sum up, we believe the research conducted by our team as well as the deliverables we provide to the YWCA will provide a framework for improving the current sites interface and overall user experience. We hope that the design document provided above will help aid all staff members in contributing to a more cohesive and consistent site. Following these basic principles of design will create higher satisfaction with all users, an increase in the amount of users accessing the site, and a return on investment for the organization itself.