SNEHA, Inc. is a Connecticut-based network for the South Asian community. They work to support and empower women, particularly survivors of domestic violence. SNEHA also assists in acculturation situations that arise from lack of traditional family support and/or unfamiliarity with United States laws and resources. The website is their tool for engaging the community, volunteers, and donors, as well as educating the wider public about the work.
SNEHA, Inc. needs feedback on their current website’s layout, user-friendliness, content, and general look and feel. They’d like their site to be more visually appealing, professional, and user-friendly, aligning with our organization’s identity and mission.
To enhance the visual aesthetics, increase site engagement, and redesign the site to accurately represent the org's mission and services while making it more user-friendly. The design contains Lorem Ipsum to allow the organization to plug in their content (their content is still being developed).
Due to humanities nature of this organization, these "competing" organizations are less so competitors and moreso partners in the space
How do similar organizations with the same mission structure their site and provide help to South Asian domestic violence survivors?
Due to the sensitive nature of the audience/user base, interview participants could not be recruited for this project. I chose to gather secondary user data to build a basis for understanding SNEHA's users. This data was found in multiple studies conducted by the National Institute of Health (NIH).
I then created a preliminary affinity map to categorize and organize the insights found in the NIH studies. This visual presentation helped begin to better empathize with target user group and their experiences
Although direct user interviews were not an option for this project, I interviewed multiple stakeholders, in this case board members, to learn more about the people they aim to serve.
Interviewing the organization's board members gave me a fuller, more complete picture of not only the people they serve (our users), but also the range of services they provide.
Stakeholder goals and expectations:
How might we help South Asian domestic violence survivors quickly find the resources they need?
How might we integrate a calendar functionality of sorts that can easily be maintained so South Asians can know when and where to build community?
How might we make the resources accessible in multiple languages?
This MVP feature roadmap focuses on delivering strong core features while evaluating them by uses value and effort. I prioritized features that solve fundamental pain points and provide immediate value, while deferring enhancements that require costly effort, but provide little user value. These can be added in future iterations. By identifying the essential capabilities, it helps ensure resources are concentrated on building a solid user experience.
Creating a user flow chart allowed me to understand where friction could be felt in a main user flow: finding domestic violence resources. This pushed me to think about how I could solve for underlying user needs in the main flow (e.g. if a user finds the site, if they can't translate to a language they understand, they're more likely to exit the site and not receive the help they need).
Prior to the design revamp:
Keeping project goals in mind, I redesigned the navigation, footer, and sitemap, as well as helped bring wishlist features to life. The information that needs to be prioritized for the user are front and center- the Domestic Violence Helpline number with a main CTA as well as a "Quick Escape" button that is sticky upon scrolling. This is essential to build a sense of safety and confidentiality for a user in a dangerous situation.
UX design without ensuring it meets user needs is simply UI design. To evaluate the effectiveness and intuitiveness of the feature design, usability tests were conducted.
Tests were conducted using the Maze.co platform. This allowed me to test remotely, but also have the ability to screen record participants's movements, facial expressions, and record their voice. These are all important to collect nonverbal cues during testing.
Rewiring the “Get Help” button on the “Our Services” page to lead to resources. However, it’d have to be to an actual page of the resources needed, not solely the “Resources” page.
Restructuring the “Resources” page. Instead of using the current “Local, Legal, National” tabs, organize the resources by service type (e.g. Domestic Violence, Legal Assistance, Immigration, Emergency Aid).
After considering the timeline, only one of these feedback items could be implemented. I chose to iterate on the 2nd point of feedback to stay within the time constraints of the project.
Through the different hiccups that surfaced in this client project, I learned to expand my mind and be more resourceful- to think outside the standard UX design framework. When direct user interviews weren't an option, I looked elsewhere to gather enough secondary data to build a foundational understanding of the user, in addition to learning more from stakeholders.
If the project deadline and timeline were farther out, I would've liked to do some low fidelity frames and testing as well as input all of the content that the organization is still working on.