Transforming user experience and IA for a UXR platform
Our capstone project encapsulates a full on web redesign for UXRS surrounding its information architecture and design interface.
Team
3 ux designers,
1 project manager
Client
UXRS President
(Jake Rhodes)
Duration
Jan - Jun 2024
Project Background
UX Research & Strategy (UXRS) is an NPO serving its community through regular event-hosting and news article posts on UXR-related topics. However, their website's traffic does not reflect this large community base.
Goal:
How can we design an experience that will increase the website traffic and invite UX researchers to actively be part of the UXRS community?
Community Aspect
Aside from a good-looking website, what draws users into a product is how they brand themselves to the audience. For UXRS, this is their community.
We restructured their website, starting with the home page to allow easy accessibility to their socials, emphasizing their Slack channel because that is where user activity mostly lies.
Merging Events Pages
Once we realized the redundancy of have two separate pages of hosting event information, we brainstormed how we could structure a brand new page to effectively display these resources to the user.
Removing one unnecessary menu tab also gives space to add another, which would be our community page.
All Projects
Understanding the Problem
User Research
Website traffic does not reflect large community base
Navigation structure is inefficient and redundant
ambiguous endless scrolling lack of filters media presence
Difficult to find and join community base
Print function shows 100+ pages on past events tab
Inadequate filter options makes it unintuitive
No direction toward their website on social media postings
UXRS boasts a user base of nearly 100,000 followers on some of their social media platforms, though this number is no where to be seen on their monthly traffic data
We analyzed a recent survey study done by the UXRS team and identified their user base
What do our users need?
Filtering News Archive
Based on good UX practice, we found the current state of the News page to be ineffective when it comes to filter options.
We concluded that having a date selection range would be adequate for improving their limited selection of months while adding sorting options from newest/oldest along with a search option to allow for more accuracy.
Analyzing User Patterns
Before going ahead with our design decisions, how did we end up with them?
First, we analyzed the UXRS website data and found that users tend to stay within the first two pages (Home and Upcoming Events), before losing interest in further exploring the platform.
Our solution with the home page helps tackle this issue by immediately prompting to visit the community page. We also updated the Events situation which will be covered below.
Website User Flow
Next, we decided with the user end tasks and finalized with the main pages they will fall in.
This gives us a foundation on creating the skeleton of the new and improved website.
Typography and Color
Finally, creating a typography and color palette provides a streamline design process that also promotes consistency.
More User Research
Experts
Novices
Crafting user personas from qualitative survey data
Our findings from an existing survey study conducted by UXRS led us to the two, previously mentioned target users.
The behaviors we associated these personas with came from an affinity diagram we created from the survey data. We found four main themes:
From both of these results, we can formulate journey maps that help us anticipate the user's behavior and needs, which will be tested during our usability test.
Usability Testing
We went to a professional research lab in the Microsoft campus to compare the existing website and our newly developed prototype.
We created a usability lab protocol and due to circumstances, were only able to find and pay two separate users representing the novices in UX.
Final Design Decisions
With approval from our client, the product is set to be implemented and launched by around late 2024 to early 2025.
2024 - 2025
We predicted that page lag such as the past events would be reduced from 7.1s to around 600ms.
11.3x Faster
Findings from our usability tests show that all of our users were satisfied with the new product.
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