Big Brothers Big Sisters
Job
The Team
Mya Certossi (myself)
Yusra
Farrukh
Cynthia (Sanaa)
Khalil
The Brief
"BBBSHH was looking for a more user-friendly redesign of their site as well as someone to conduct market research, balancing UX and Marketing. These findings were shared and implemented Canada-wide in the company."
My official title during this employment period was User Experience Designer and Marketing Coordinator as I had the opportunity to work both in UX and marketing.
Understanding
The project began with trying to understand the pain points of the former site. This included the conducting of a heuristic evaluation as well as a key contextual inquiry to gain a deeper understanding of: areas of the site that should be prioritized, the patterns that the users follow when completing tasks, and how the users perceive the organization through the website. Usability testing came up with many insights and recommendations to improve the site and begin the redesign process.
The goals in the original research included:
Gain an understanding of users and make the design relevant.
Confirm that the issues in the heuristic evaluation were true to the user's needs.
Identify areas to improve and build upon for better user satisfaction and understanding.
Research
Throughout every step of the prototyping process, testing was essential to the success of building a more user-friendly site. After the first set of testing, we conducted competitive analysis and extensive usability testing on the redesigned site, analyzing user's reactions and needs.
Some notable metrics we had reported on by the end of the final usability testing included:
10%
20.75 sec
100%
Rise in unaided success among the participants.
Less on average time per task.
Of users chose the new site over the old one.
User Needs Analysis
"Families, volunteers, and donors need a way to find information quickly, connect with a friendly and trusting environment, and navigate easily in order to have a positive BBBSHH website experience and want to re-visit the site."
Prototyping
The prototyping process began after gaining the original insights, ideation starting with sketches and simple wireframes to help us better understand what needed to be changed and updated.
Navigation Menu Changes
Home Page
Certain redundancies pointed out by user testers were eliminated throughout the site or moved to a more appropriate location.
Before
After
Volunteer Page
Information overload was mitigated by revising long text and using helpful buttons to direct toward the right place.
Before
After
Programs Page
Some pages proved to be confusing all-together, but the improved programs page proved to be much better designed from the user's perspective.
Before
After
Contact Page
Before
After
Some pages were just redesigned to be over-all more intuitive and reflect other sites that are friendly to users.
Presenting
These proposals and the research to back it up were presented to the board of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Canada to help them better understand the needs of their users. The information presented also backed many of the decisions they needed validation for, but had already noticed within the experience connected with their website. Suggestions like choosing less jargon with more consistent language, better colour choices within the site, and improved navigation options helped the team better understand how outsiders experience could be improved in the site. The presentation lasted approximately 30 minutes with a 30 minute conversation and question period after. The team at BBBS were overjoyed by the work presented and the reports helped them better understand the depth behind the decisions and changes suggested to implement.