Case Study by Amar Puni
Creative conscience are a non for profit organisation who aim to inspire designers to apply their talents to socially valuable projects, promoting sustainability, freedom, social health and well-being. They are the only 100% ethical awards/ impact platform, they are in their 4th year running and are a global initiative.
TOOLS
Paper, sharpie’s, scissors, tape, post-it-notes, InVision prototyping, Sketch, Omnigraffle.
SKILLS
Business analysis; competitive analysis; research
User research; user interviews; user flows; sketching; paper prototyping;
BRIEF
During a 2 week agile sprint our team of 4 were challenged to evolve the site to solve usability issues around the way users navigate around their website. The scope of this project was to make the site more appealing to partners, receive more donations & inspire educators and students to enter the awards.
PROBLEM
The team at creative conscience highlighted some key areas on their website that they identified as having usability issues around the way users navigate the ‘Winners Page’, they currently have a filtering system for the awards. They want to make the site more appealing to educators/students and partners. We need to inspire and engage educators and students to get more entries and In order to get more partners and donors they want us to focus on the impact projects (these are projects that have now gone live). We need to build on their current social media links so they can spread more awareness and we also need to reconsider their current submission form. Data from google analytics show that the website has a bounce rate of 50–60 this year on 2 pages — Home Page and Briefs Page.
HYPOTHESIS
- Re-design the filtering options for awards on the ‘Winners Page’
- Re-design pages on the site
- Provide the correct information to students/educators & partners/donors.
- Incorporate more social media to spread awareness
- Reduce the bounce rate on the ‘Home Page’ & ‘Briefs Page’
Create a site which clearly communicates who we are, what we do and the belief that students can use their skills to truly impact society.
OUR ROLE
UX Researcher
UX Designer
RESEARCH & PERSONAS
We started our research by conducting a competitive analysis on other design awards to gain an understanding of what features they have incorporated into their sites, in addition to how they have their information structured. We done some individual research on the current creative conscience website and mapped our findings onto a spider diagram.
This helped us identify the areas in which we need to make improvements. We can clearly see where we need to make improvements from the diagram above, this allowed us to focus on each of these areas.
We created a user survey on google docs which allowed us to get an understanding of what people expect with entering a design award.
With the response we received from the survey we were able to narrow down our search to our target audience i.e recent graduates, people who studied design, people who have entered awards etc…
From our survey we identified 3 primary users -
- Students
- Tutors
- Partners
This allowed us to ask more specific questions to them which we prepared as a team on a questionnaire. We conducted some user testing on the current creative conscience website which allowed us to understand what people’s experiences were, what they enjoyed and what they disliked about the process involved with entering an award through the website.
This was very beneficial as this highlighted the pain points users have with the current layout of the website. This gave us a clear indication of where we need to make improvements and what pages need attention. This research informed us that website had issues relating to the way its content is mapped out, which essentially has to do with the information architecture of the site. So this gave us a good starting point in terms of identifying where we can make improvements.
I have shown some of the key pain points highlighted from our user testing below;
At the home screen users were instantly drawn into the donate button this gave the user’s mixed signals on who creative conscience are and had a lot of people asking if they are a charity or an awards.
At the briefs page a lot of people were overwhelmed with the amount of questions at the top of the page, this is before they even got into the briefs description which slightly intimidated them.
Areas of the website were very copy heavy a lot of people did not feel very inspired because of the lack of imagery around other people’s work and projects that have been brought to life, this made people feel like the website lacked inspiration.
AFFINITY MAPS, TASK ANALYSIS & USER FLOW
After collating all of our results from the competitor analysis, user research, online survey, questionnaire and user testing we identified 3 design goals we needed to adopt to ensure we met our client’s brief -
- Bring forward CREDIBILITY
- Give CLARITY
- Provide INSPIRATION
So we identified that we needed to focus on the features and the content to make sure we are getting the right information to our 3 primary users. To get more entries we need to inspire educators and students, to get more donations and partners we need to showcase the projects that have been made live ‘Impact Projects’.
We went on to create a task analysis and user journey on ‘submitting a design idea for the awards’ to map out the experience of what the user feels through this journey.
This helped us identify some key points and allowed us to list some of the the features and content we need to achieve our business goals.
These were all mapped in a MOSCOW diagram which helped us decide what features and content we ‘Must’ incorporate as opposed to some features & content we ‘Could’, ‘Should’ and ‘Won’t’ add.
Feature we must add consisted of;
Content we must add consisted of;
Once we understood our key issues and listed our key features and content we were able to sketch out some user flows.
A User flow for submitting a design to creative conscience awards;
A User flow for making a donation to creative conscience -
We wanted to start sketching out some screens, so we conducted a design studio with some of the staff at creative conscience. This allowed us to brainstorm our thoughts behind some of the screens and some of our findings we got from our research, we were able to bounce some ideas off one another so we would have a clearer understanding of how we wanted information laid out and how we can make this accessible to our users.
Prototyping
We then went on to conduct some user testing with our 1st clickable prototype which was done by using InVision. This allowed us to gain some feedback in our approach and also allowed us to make changes where we needed to i.e remove the donate button in the homepage and create a separate page for donations and partners which we named ‘Support Us’ — we felt that this helped take away the mixed feelings people had about the awards which should reduce the bounce rate on this page (as people found the button was too pushy), while still having an option available for people who want to donate and become partners.
The initial version was low fidelity with no images, but did show layout, buttons and labelling.
With each iteration we further tested and gained more insight into the user’s preference and understanding of the site navigation.
We printed out all of the screens we created in low fidelity and annotated our findings from our user testing next to the areas our users highlighted. This allowed us to decide as a team what changes we would need to make.
One key change we made was that users were confused during the application process, they didn’t know what was expected from them for submission, So to clarify this uncertainty we added a “Before You Start Page’ which users are taken to automatically before
entering the application process. This page highlights 4 key points which gives students a clear understanding of what is required from them. They are asked to check the briefs, read tips & ideas, informs them of the different formats they can submit with and finally some terms and conditions to help clarify any questions they may have in terms of ownership of design ideas, how/if creative awards will use their designs in any publications etc…
OUTCOME
We now have a fully functional high fidelity prototype. With the changes we have made, we believe we will have achieved:
- A Reduced bounce rate
- Increase in Submissions
- Increase in Donations
- Increase in interest from partners
NEXT STEPS
From the user interviews and user testing we received a lot of feedback and ideas of what features could potentially be added to the website.
- Account Function — so users can have an account to update project work,
- Make a Profile with portfolio work
- Create a Community- so students can connect with other people and essentially make this a platform for students to share ideas and thoughts.
PROTOTYPE LINK
Our Creative Conscience website prototype can be found here: https://invis.io/V38TYQEAE
