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NSHC
Nepal Seattle Hiking Community is group that connects Nepalase people in Washington to come together for outdoor events in the area.
This project was done in Web Design class with with Suzzane Boyd, CEO Anthrotech at the University of Washington from Mar 24 - Jun 23.
Project Brief
Role
Web Design & Research
Duration
9 weeks
Stakeholders
Nepal Seattle Hiking Community
Collaborators
Brandon Curley, Hannah Sogawa, Yuka Fan, Yung Jan Chang
Context
Have you ever felt confused or frustrated while using a non-profit website?
Nepal Seattle Hiking Community operated a website that showcases an online presence of the group but did have not any flows for user where their need would be met by exploring it. The events page would lead to dead end generic information, the contact us form would not have any signals to the topic of query, and no way to know how to participate in the upcoming events were some of the issues that the website persisted.
Objectives
Functionality and traction were the main concerns of the group that would potentially help them establish the website as the main channel for the community.
01
Enhance the functionality of the websites, allowing more interaction for users to learn and sign up about upcoming events.
02
Create scope for contributions and partnerships for prospectives partners.
Lack of Design System
The older homepage was created on Squarespace and never had any professional design intervention to assess and support end user needs. None of the existing elements had a clear consistency among them.
Misleading Information Heirarchy
The options from IA lacks highlighting the sections that directs the user to the main goals of the community like increasing sign ups, donations, and partnerships.
Overwhelming Hero Section
The Hero image makes it harder to read the title and drives the focus away from the message or the available CTAs at the bottom.
Unclear Pathways & Missing Action Items
Different sections and CTAs throughout the page lack any organisation and do not lead the user to a true information rich or functional page that would help meet their needs.
Confusing Contact Us Page
The contact us page is generic does not have clear indication for the purpose of contacting the community and what to expect next.
Lack of Social Media Integration
Despite Facebook being the major marketing and communication space, there was no clear mention of the Facebook on the website.
Problem Space
User Research
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
This is a competitive feature evaluation of the pages that the client is currently interested in introducing to their website. The competitors are similar websites that are for a particular community to engage in outdoor activities like hiking.
FACEBOOK ANALYTICS
The research process for conducting Facebook Analytics was done manually as follows, scroll through the public Facebook page and record information about NSHC events in a spreadsheet. Read comments, other posts, and anything else on the Facebook page and answer questions about the organization using this information. Recorded data is included in the appendix.
Note: Meta exposes an API for researchers but there is a long approval process to get access which is out of scope for this assignment. So I gave my best effort to pull Facebook Analytics manually for this assignment.
FOCUS GROUPS
A focus group was conducting through convenience sampling with youth who are interested in outdoor community based activities.
Research Artifacts
AUDIENCE MATRIX
An audience task matrix was created to generate the personas using the key goals, questions and unmet needs of the users.
PERSONAS
Three prominent personas were chosen to flesh out for the purpose of this study that were most relevant to the business goals.
#1 HIKER
#2 VOLUNTEER
#3 DONOR
Information Architecture
The older navigation lacked segregation that would be meet the business goals and user needs. The sub-headings lacked diversity and constrained the scope of information to be provided.
CARD SORTING
Cards of existing options and prospective features that the organisation desired were added to the the Optimal Workshop platform which was used to perform card sorting by 11 respondents.
The results were grouped and analysed through a Dendogram that showed how often the cards were clubbed together into categories.
PROPOSED INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Based on the results of the card sorting the highest grouped categories were identified and arranged together to create a user informed architecture.
Designs
PLAYGROUND FOR IDEATION
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USABILITY TESTING
The live prototype of the final designs were tested through 6 usability sessions with 10 different tasks that were curated for each persona. An evaluation of number of errors and confusion areas revealed the scope of improvements in the design.
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