As a part of my Information Architecture & Interaction Design course at Pratt Institute, I worked on the redesign of the Girl Scouts of Greater New York Website. The original site had cluttered organization and a chaotic visual aesthetic, and it was difficult to understand who the target audience was. The main goal of the project was to improve the existing site to be more intuitive and streamlined for caregivers to navigate. Throughout the project, we took into consideration research data from user interviews and user testing, and multiple rounds of feedback from wireframes and prototyping.
Understanding Users’ Perspectives and Needs
As a team, we first gathered to familiarize ourselves with the task and set a plan of action. We then discussed our target audience, and conducted multiple user interviews with current or potential caregivers of Girl Scouts, in order to better understand our users. Through our interviews, our aim was to figure out what the greatest needs, wants, and questions of caregivers (target audience) were, in order to adequately prioritize and organize information on our site redesign.
Overall Findings:
From our interviews, we found that many users prioritized the ability to see the program details and offerings of an organization, as well as the mission and values that they adhere to.
Envisioning a Target User
Based on data extracted from our interviews and research, we developed a user persona to depict our target audience. We also developed user stories and tasks that would be the basis for our site redesign.
User Stories/Tasks:
After creating our user personas, our team developed 3 user stories based on the needs/wants we discovered in our research:
User story 1: Find information about the Girl Scouts of Greater New York program, and learn more about what their Leadership Development and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) programs entail.
User story 2: Learn about what membership with the Girl Scouts of Greater New York entails and register a child as a Member.
User story 3: Learn about ways to give to the Girl Scouts of Greater New York, learn more about the Trefoil Society (a donors-only group), and make a donation to the Campaign for Girl HQ).
Competitive Analysis
The last portion of our research phase before starting to ideate and build our site was competitive analysis. This was crucial in understanding the positive and negative aspects of other sites that had similar audiences as the Girl Scouts of Greater New York. Below is a diagram of our summarized insights:
Optimizing the Navigation System
Following our user research, we conducted Card Sorting and Tree testing analyses to get a better understanding of our to design our site navigation. From the data extracted from these tests, we landed at the site map pictured below, from which we derived our site organizational structure. We consolidated an initial total of 136 content pages into 60 pages, with improved information architecture. As we continued to wireframe and user test, we made further adaptations to this organizational structure.
Creating a Style Guide
Because the Girl Scouts already have a strong brand identity and style, we did our best to keep our style guide as close to the official GSGNY Style Guide as possible. Main changes including adjusting some font sizes and variance of color usage in our hi-fi prototype to ensure accessibility and to maintain a clean and cohesive visual aesthetic.
Lo-Fi Wireframes
Based off the research we had conducted thus far, we finally began to build out our site redesign with low-fidelity wireframes. After sketching and brainstorming some visual ideas, we divided up the pages to design amongst our team. We made sure to constantly refer back to our user stories, to create a site that would best match our target audience.
Mobile Iterations:
Desktop Iterations:
Final Prototypes
Each of our team members conducted user testing with our low-fidelity wireframes, which gave us detailed information about what improvements we could make to our site design. After multiple iterations, these were the final wireframes of the Girl Scouts of GNY Desktop and Mobile Sites. Full interactive prototypes are linked under the screenshots.
Reflections
Overall, this project was highly beneficial in getting to understand the dynamics of working with a team of designers and collaborating to put a project together. There were definitely learning curves in communication, and learning to combine 5 different members’ perspectives and ideas for design into one project. Conducting various types of user testing and competitive analysis was a great learning experience, and it was fascinating to continuously see the influence of the research portion on the rest of the site redesign as the project progressed forward. I’m grateful to have been able to work with a team who were always willing to communicate and grow, and to give and receive feedback as well. On a personal note, this project definitely stretched me to think with greater empathy for users, and also in my prototyping skills.