Preparing the final touches on our project and handing it off to DPIC
How can we prepare DPIC for change?
As we reach the end of our capstone project, we are shifting our focus towards ensuring that our deliverables are helpful and implementable for DPIC both in the short term and in the long term. We have decided to approach this strategy by pursuing 4 different channels in parallel:
- Information Architecture: Redesigning a new IA for the website will allow users to both easily find the content they need and discover new content.
- Content Strategy: Through content models and style guides, DPIC can standardize their content and optimize the content creation to better fit their future vision.
- Learning Experiences: With education on the death penalty through interactive and engaging experiences, users can more easily digest complex information and engage with it in more meaningful ways.
- Internal Solutions: In order for all of our proposed prototypes to be implemented, DPIC needs to have the backend infrastructure for data and workflows to support these new efforts.
By tackling all 4 channels, we can provide DPIC with actionable and comprehensive documentation for how to evolve. Our goal is to help guide them for the next years with gradual changes over time in order to set them up for a successful future state of learning and impact in the long term.
Information Architecture
Information Architecture (IA) is fundamental to all websites. It informs how information on the website relates to each other and how that information is presented to users. There are different ways in which this could manifest itself, including through the navigation on the site itself or in the taxonomy of the content.
DPIC is a resource wealth of death penalty information that is somewhat difficult for newer learners to wade through. Having a more straightforward IA structure will therefore help DPIC’s website:
- Feel more approachable to a wider variety of users
- Create clear relationships between similar pieces of content
- Have a solid foundation for future website improvements that will need to rely on a strong website IA
DPIC’s current IA structure (shown above) causes confusion because of its use of 1) terms that confuse newer learners and 2) unclear category distinctions (e.g. policy issues vs facts & research).
Our hopes for a new DPIC AI therefore center around using easier to understand language and distinct categories. We’re inspired by websites like OXFAM and EJI (shown below) in which content is divided into clear categories which are then broken down even further within the navigation. This way, large amounts of information can be broken down into smaller parts that, when put together into an IA, is clear for users.
We are tackling this IA restructuring through using an open card sort. This research technique allows us to understand how people would group categories of information based on their own understanding. This allows us to understand their mental model of death penalty informational and educational content. An example of what an open card sort looks like is shown here:
Our next steps with findings from the card sort is to create a preliminary IA that we can use to do usability testing in the next two weeks with participants. This will give us a strong foundation for what IA structure we suggest to DPIC along with the research backing up that suggestion.
Content Strategy
Currently there is lack of visual and structural consistency in how DPIC displays information. While not all information should be structured the same, similar types of pages shouldn’t have different visual and structural format. This consistency will help users navigate the website better because they know what to expect. It also allows them to more easily and quickly understand the information and build connections across pages.
In order to tackle this problem, we designed content models that will act as templates that DPIC can refer to when creating web pages. We decided to design these content models for 6 distinct types of pages that we’ve seen DPIC use, and that our research showed is desirable. These 6 page types were:
- General Articles
- Overview of Topic pages
- Learning/education focused pages
- Data Heavy Pages
- Interactive experiences
- Case studies or Personal stories
When designing the content models we focused on creating a structure that would be engaging for users. In order to test the effectiveness of our content models we created examples of them and tested them with 12 participants who have fairly low knowledge about the death penalty. Overwhelming we found high levels of engagement across all pages.
Furthermore in order for DPIC to have a consistent voice and tone when creating content, we created a Voice/ Tone guide for DPIC staff to use. This guide will help DPIC stay consistent with their messaging across all communication channels. It will also help strengthen DPIC’s brand and improve users’ connection with DPIC’s content.
Learning Experiences
Throughout our research we have found that taking on an educational approach can help make DPIC information more accessible and understandable to learners with lower knowledge of the death penalty. Our rigorous testing has pointed to the fact that focusing on personal connections, interactivity, and approachable formats can help people better digest this information. Thus, it is important for DPIC to explore and implement learning experiences in addition to their more data-heavy and academic sources in order to successfully reach a wider audience of people. These learning experiences are not just about acquiring more knowledge, but also about finding meaningful connections and interpreting the information in a way that feels purposeful.
While we generated many concepts for learning experiences in the past, we now focused on which ones would be the most impactful and helpful for DPIC to see built out at this stage. Keeping in mind that different people have different needs, we plotted our concepts on an Impact v. Effort Matrix for each archetype.
Then, we identified any overlaps in high impact ideas across archetypes and were able to narrow down on a few learning experiences to focus on.
While we are only able to focus on a select few concepts because of our limited time on the project, we plan on handing off all concept sketches along with the Impact v. Effort Matrices to DPIC for future development!
Improving Internal Processes
Finally, in order to help DPIC implement all these ideas, we wanted to tackle the backend workflows and data infrastructure. At this stage, DPIC is looking for internal improvements as the current systems have become a burden on the staff. Thus, we talked to various members of the DPIC staff to identify the biggest pain points and opportunity areas in which we could be most helpful, and devised a plan of action.
- For internal workflow improvements, we mapped out a journey map alongside DPIC staff, evaluating each step from ideating new content ideas to publishing them on the website.
We looked at it in terms of timing, people involved, and important considerations. This helped us structure our evaluation of the process, identifying opportunity areas and questions at each step. With this in mind, we plan on creating some template and checklist documents that can assist DPIC staff at different stages of the process to be more efficient, improve consistency, and prevent errors.
2. Secondly, to reduce friction with accessing, entering, retrieving, and processing information from the database, we plan to redesign DPIC’s current database admin tool.
We will hold a shadowing session to observe and understand the staff’s frustrations with the tool and create a user flow. We will produce lo-fi wireframes and ideas for how the data entry and retrieval touchpoints can be more intuitive and user-friendly.
Putting it all together
We’re in the exciting process of consolidating everything we’ve learned in the past 8 months! We’re putting together our research insights, new education-focused strategy, content models, information architecture, new learning experiences, and testing feedback into high-fidelity prototypes and ideas that DPIC can take forth with them.
Those prototypes look a little something like this:
The prototypes will showcase our proposed interactive learning experiences embedded within them:
We also plan to deliver some of the learning experiences that we felt didn’t fit into a content model template but deserved a spot on the collection of future ideas.
Finally, before handing these final ideas and designs off to DPIC, we’re putting the finishing touches on them based on results from concept and usability testing. We want to ensure that the content is personalized yet comprehensive and that the visuals and tone strike the specific balance of being emotionally engaging yet unbiased.
We’re extremely excited to have had the chance to work on this project with our friends at the Death Penalty Information Center. We hope that our work helps to further their mission of being the most credible and critical source of information about the death penalty in the US.
