Bringing relevance to the March for Science (MFS) website - 2019

Situation:

A young volunteer based organization, while successful in the social media context, needed support improving the relevance and viability of its own Web Site.

Task:

Assess and Redesign site to be both user friendly and bring content relevant to its variety of stakeholders, by addressing known concerns of leaders, UX best practices and unknowns that will be found in stakeholder interviews.

Actions:

• Capture detailed feedback and input from the stakeholders

• Consolidate requirements, verify and prioritize them with stakeholders

• Devise information architecture

• Plan pages – typically this results in wireframes, but given ease of using Wix, it was done as a Wix draft pages.

• Verify IA/page concepts with stakeholders

• Dev pages

• Validate pages with stakeholders

• Iterative Dev

Key Discoveries:

1. MFS had a traditional v1.0 design that users found unintuitively organized and inconsistent page layouts on Desktop or Mobile UIs

2. As an organization reliant on Volunteers and money from donations/shoppers, it lacked prioritization of these within the UI.

3. Stale content, as its news footprint was all on social media

4. No successes listed showing the org’s relevance in its community

5. Single-person point of failure, as the one admin maintained both structure and content.

Results:

Shifted MFS site into intuitive desktop and mobile site, improving ease of donation and volunteer options, and showing MFS’s freshest content from across the web, all while actually reducing site admin’s future workload.

This was accomplished via:

An intuitively structed site with consistent user experiences across desktop and mobile.

Showcased recent org successes

• Process Example: a simplistic concept of “Successes” initially requested by leaders in a paragraph format. After showing a basic mockup was perceived as too heavy & was preferred by all (leaders and users) in a carousel format, as preferred; the Carousel both minimized content visible (to avoid overstimulation) while also giving each success individual focus, as the leaders desired.

Highlighting donation, shop and volunteer options - via splash and distinct buttons

Improved content provisioning: Visitors/Readers received a one stop shop for the latest MFS news, and events, as well as access to resources like graphics for posters, etc.; this was all done via dynamically centralized information from all MFS social media feeds, creation of new content sources on the MFS site itself, as well as the improved information-architecture to find existing resources.

Minimizing the admin workload and risk as a single point of failure by granting content providers abilities to post and maintain their own content.