Travel Unity is a 501(c) non profit organization focused on increasing diversity within the world of travel. My team and I reached out to the organization for an unsolicited redesign of their desktop website to improve their information architecture.
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 8th - December 1st 2022
UX Researcher
UX Designer
Desktop
Figma
Slack
Zoom
Double Diamond (Discover > Define > Develop > Deliver)
Sam Chung: Researcher, Asset Collector, Wireframer + Prototyper for Hi-Fi Designs
Derick Yeh: Researcher, Wireframer + Prototyper for Hi-Fi Designs
Fatima G Jhong: Content writer + Researcher
With an interest in helping diverse groups, we reached out to Travel Unity for a redesign of their desktop website. While informative, we noticed that the Travel Unity website was a bit outdated compared to modern day websites with a similar format but we reached out because we wanted to dig deeper. We wanted to find out how we could use UX design to solve problems the business might be having.
Once we received the approval from Travel Unity on a redesign, we set up a meeting with Roni Weiss (the founder of TU) to understand Travel Unity’s goals and the challenges they might be having behind the scenes.
Our meeting with Roni gave us some major takeaways:
While Roni gave us some ideas on where we could start with this redesign project, he recommended that we talk to Elijah, the director of Youth and Collegiante programs for more information on what the business wants us to focus on.
From our meeting with Elijah we understood more of Travel Unity's goals:
With an idea of where the business wants to focus, we decided to conduct a Heuristic Evaluation of problem areas on Travel Unity's website to get an idea of what users might be experiencing. We tackled heuristic evaluations of the homepage, program pages (Travel Unity's Global Scholars, College Corps, Youth Advisory Council) and volunteer page. (The heuristic evaluation was completed by another team member and I, but I will showcase my work from the Home, College Corps, Global Scholars and Youth Advisory Council pages)
I created a usability test script for my team to conduct 6 user interviews of students interested in the world of travel.
The test consisted of questions and scenarios that would help us understand:
We created an affinity map to organize interview findings into pain points (things users felt dissatisfied with), motivations (what they looked forward to or felt happy to see) and behaviors (actions users took while testing).
Some key takeaways from testing included:
This led to the realization of our problem statement:
The insight into our HMW statement and what users thought about Travel Unity's website helped craft our persona: Alex Rodriguez.
We revised the original structure of Travel Unity's navigation system based on the feedback received from Usability Testing in addition to an open card sort created by two of our team members.
Originally we set a deadline to complete our project within 12 weeks but we also didn't realize that some of our team members would be completing another project in the same time frame. We shortened the amount of flows that we'd focus on from showcasing all program pages on Travel Unity's website to a single flow of the Homepage into the College program page. This way we'd give our stakeholders an idea of what the journey from the homepage into one of their programs would look like.
Most of our team members sketched how we imagined a user would make it from the landing page into a specific program page. We sketched out designs for the homepage and an example program page based on the feedback we'd received from usability testing. We also voted on the designs we aligned on using stickies inside the program Figjam.
For our low-fidelity wireframes, I was in charge of redesigning portions of the homepage and redesigning the Youth & Collegiate Programs page. Below I will detail the changes I made from the original design into the redesign. However, you can view all of our low-fidelity wireframes here.
This is the current prototype of our hi-fidelity solution for Travel Unity.