Reach One Youth is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization whose mission is to provide youth development programs for underserved youth. In this project we reached out to the organization for a desktop redesign to address accessibility concerns.
The Covid-19 Pandemic forcibly took students from the classroom and back into their homes. As a result, virtual learning students in K-12thgrades have faced a variety of obstacles such as low academic performance. I planned on using design and research to uncover solutions for these users.
September 1st - December 1st 2022
UX Designer
Asset Collector
Desktop
Figma
Slack
Zoom
Double Diamond (Discover > Define > Develop > Deliver)
Hydeia Blakey: UX Designer
Jalena Threatt: Content Writer/Researcher
Jayna Taylor: UX Researcher
Stephanie R: UX Designer/Asset Collector
My team & I started this project after investigating several non-profit organizations that we could give back our UX design skills and time to. Given that the team resonated with their mission to help underserved and disenfranchised youth, Reach One Youth is an organization that we were interested in helping with accessibility issues we were experiencing while using the website. We reached out to the organization to see if they were interested in a redesign and waited for a response.
After receiving an email back that the company was interested, we gave a presentation detailing who we are, why we were interested in redesigning their accessibility issues and how we could help through UX Design.
We received tons of feedback and were given preliminary research on what the company wanted us to focus on, their target users and what was important to their business to highlight for our project.
With our target users in mind, I assisted the research team with creating a heuristic evaluation of Reach One's website and provided feedback on my findings.
With a knowing is learning attitude, our research members investigated users thoughts on the website to see what they thought about it.
From usability testing 6 users, the research team uncovered some key findings through affinity mapping which was essential in my process to generating ideas for a potential solution.
I created a sitemap to show the page hierarchy to help organize the information architecture on the current website. The sitemap is based on open card sort results compiled by the research team.
Based on the insights uncovered from affinity mapping, we created three goals that would be our focus for the redesign.
With the company's target users in mind and our goals for the project, the research team created two persona's: Parent and Volunteer for this project. It was important to have these users in mind as I moved towards sketching because these are the users we were designing for.
This led us to our how might we statement:
With our HMW statement in mind, I created common user flows that aligned with the company and user goals. The following user flows are focused on making Reach One Youth's programs more accessible and user centered.
We began to complete several sketches keeping in mind common donation and non profit-layouts and standard desktop conventions for inspiration behind this. Each team member created several sketches of the proposed user flows.
With sketches created and decisions made with ideas we aligned on, we started low-fidelity designing in grayscale. Going forward in this study, I'll annotate and highlight my responsibilities from the design process.
For the low-fidelity wireframes, I was in charge of the main portions of Flow 1 which include the sports page and registration forms.
Low-Fidelity Wireframes ushered us into the hi-fidelity design amongst our impeading deadline to present this project to our stakeholders. My design partner created a style guide with an expanded color palette of Reach One Youth's color scheme and a new typography system that's clean to read on desktop systems.
