The first thing we wanted to do was to interview our client to get a better understanding of the types of members were involved in the organization. Since KOTX hasn't had its own website before, we also wanted to learn about its purpose and what was important to the org's board and its members. This would inform any features and architecture of the site, alongside the branding.
We learned from talking with our clients that:
We used the member types from the client interview to inform who we'd reach out to for our user interviews. In them, we asked them further questions about, from their point of view, what KOTX was to them, what a typical day with KOTX would be like, and any issues logistically that they felt could be improved within the org.
Throughout our interviews, we learned:
We consolidated these findings into personas with specific scenarios and corresponding use cases to help us prioritize features on the prospective site.
Our next steps involved finding inspiration for branding based on our client and users interviews. While taking into account our users' desire for a mixture of dark backdrop and bright accent colors, we looked at websites for college organizations, professional dance studios and dance groups.
Discussions I had with my team involved:
We presented our design plans in a creative brief that we presented to our client to get feedback and approval. In it, we detailed 4 HTML pages we planned to implement, our intended audience informed by our personas, and sketches to the potential design.
In another meeting, we detailed the features that we planned to implement through the annotated screenshots in our functional specification.
Styling Challenges
After finishing up most of the content in our wireframes, our stakeholders gave us varying opinions on styling:
Taking these sentiments into account while trying to capture the true essence of KOTX was important to us since the group emphasized the personality the group had. When asked how they would describe themselves, a stakeholder said they were "lively, meme-y, inclusive and fun!"
To address this, my team and I made our own individual style tiles (I made style tile 4!! hehe) based on our impressions of the group from interview data and iterated upon them after some collaborative discussion. The end results were 6 style tiles sent to members and our clients in a Google Form which we had them vote on which they felt represented the group's preferences best and give us feedback.
User testing and Information architecture challenges
We had 3 end users run through our website and the feedback we received involved:
Our clients also gave us suggestions such as:
These are the things we decided to do to address the feedback we got:
Card sorting to finalize information architecture
In order to further validate our nav changes, we spent a week doing card sorts on 10 people and tallied the data in a spreadsheet to see which layouts seemed most commonly sorted.
I remember it was during one of our weekly meetings and we happened to start discussing membership in KOTX. As we talked more about it, I realized each of my teammates' understanding of a member versus a non-member was slightly different, some saying non-members couldn't dance at all and another saying they couldn't go to socials.
I pointed this difference in our respective mental models and we planned a (panic!!) interview with a board member who could speak on the specifics of membership.
We learned that non-members could actually attend socials and dance at workshops, but they could not be in any videos, be a part of the Big/Little program, and were exempt from other discounts/benefits. We, thus, made graphics and added this content to the Join page.
After implementing these changes and doing some more user testing, we received positive feedback.