The Problem
The current Service Reef website is outdated and has been a constant complaint. The website is not user-friendly and the users get frustrated when looking for what they need.
Service Reef is a piece of software that mission leaders from churches use in order to manage mission trips for their church and their students. The website has not been updated or had any user testing since it was created almost a decade ago.
I am tasked with conducting user research to present to the product owner so he can decide what to do to it, when to act, the cost of a update or redesign, and the timeframe.
Tools
Sketch
Survey Monkey
Screaming Frog
Real Time Board
Key Goals
To identify current issues and pain points and present new design and road map.
My Role
For this project I was the Lead UX Researcher.
As the Lead UX Researcher I was tasked with planning and organizing research activities and user testing. I planned the activities in order to learn and better understand my audience and how they interacted with our current product. I designed usability tests, created surveys, ran information architecture exercises, created wireframes and a series of face to face interviews.
Understanding The User
To get a firm understanding of our user I conducted multiple interviews, created surveys and worked to get the user involved in redesigning our product with me.
To start the project off I talked to some of the current stakeholders to get their opinion of the current product. By talking to them I was able to get insight on their process of the original build as well as how they feel it could be improved. I also got information on their business goals as well as the direction of the overall company.
From here I identified some potential ideal users and conducted several face-to-face interviews followed by some observation of them using the current software. I brought the information I discovered back to some coworkers to have a brainstorming session and create some user surveys to send out. The surveys were mostly open ended questions targeted to get potential information on how they think some of the pinpoints we identified could be redesigned.
Key Findings:
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The information was presented in a way that was inconvenient to the user
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The task of finding a trip was extremely difficult
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The only visible trips on the home page were closed trips that still needed funding
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Information some of the users wanted was not on the website at all
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Key pieces of information were hidden throughout the website
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The navigation of the website was also difficult and confusing
Personas and Empathy Maps
Once I had our initial user research completed I created several personas, empathy maps, and user journeys to get more of a first hand feeling of some of the paint points and what the thought process of the user would be like.
Breaking Down the Process
Our process for this project was heavy in user research in order to identify key problems and pain points in order to move forward with the redesign.
Our key goal was to identify problems and conduct research so our process first started with interviews. We kicked off our project with interviewing the stakeholders to identify business goals, direction, and personal opinions of the current project and then moved onto interviewing potential and current users.
Following the user interviews we conducted some user observations as well as some user surveys with the goal of identifying current pain points as well as getting a since of what the users opinion on how the current product should look.
Once we received the initial research we went to the whiteboard to create multiple user personas, empathy maps, and user journeys in order to come across additional pain points ourselves that we may not have discovered during the interviews and observations.
With all of the information in front of us we began to work on the information architecture. We started with a content audit of the original product and then based on the research we added some key information that the users had mentioned they want or need. We continued working on the information architecture with the user by completing card sorting exercises. Completing these exercises helps us organize the content in the way the user wants or expects. By allowing them to work with us or work with each other the content on the page will begin to form a hierarchy that is effective.
After the card sorting exercises I brought all of the information back to my team and we did one final content audit and began working on the wireframes. This budget of this project was very low therefore we kept the wireframes on paper.
Following the wire framing we created some very simple designs in Sketch and presented the new designs as well as the original designs to several of the users we had interviewed.
Lessons Learned
Next Steps:
For this project the next step would be to present the research and designs to the stakeholder. The primary objective was to identify the pain points and what what the redesign would entail and we have achieved that thus far.
Key Takeaways:
The importance and the effect of simple information architecture is a major takeaway with this project. Without any major UI changes this entire product could be "fixed" by simply organizing the information in a way that is important to the user.