Pro bono: Fenway community center
Skill Summary: user research, heuristic evaluation, information architecture, visual design
Overview
Optum’s new Pro Bono initiative identified the Fenway Community Center as a project for a website re-design. The center was relatively new at the time and wanted to increase their presence and influence in the rapidly changing community.
Having lived and worked in the Fenway area, I wanted to give back to the place I first called home when I moved to Boston. I acted as the designer, researcher, and project manager on a two-person team—-the other Optum resource was responsible for implementing the changes in the existing Wordpress site.
The current website was purely informational, was very confusing to navigate and had some accessibility concerns. Signing up for events at the center was handled manually by staff via email or google form. The center was also looking to identify and integrate a CRM and event/appointment scheduling plugin.
Process
Attempting to follow a truly user-centered design approach, I introduced the director of the center to the idea of user research and the importance of knowing users, how its different from market research, and how it will influence the navigation and design. As much as I wanted to conduct a series of individual user interviews, I recognized that this may be too ambitious of an endeavor given the nature of their small group of mostly part-time staff, so I prepared a survey which they distributed throughout the community both digitally and on paper at events (Fenway has both universities and a senior home in its proximity). I also conducted a general heuristics review which mostly identified major navigational, color contrast, and accessibility issues. To narrow the focus of the re-design, I noted navigation and accessibility as the high priority items, especially given the elderly (often low-vision) population from the senior center that often partnered with the community center.
I then created some low-fidelity options to review with the center’s stakeholders before they had made a decision on a plugin. After researching the first CRM/scheduling plugin that was chosen, Amelia, I realized it needed to be utilized slightly differently than intended in order to allow for both one time and recurring events, as well as ad-hoc appointments. Using elements and data structure from the existing Amelia application, I re-created one of the options that would align best, and created a high-fidelity version as well.
Ultimately, given the rapidly changing choice of plugin, theme limitations, budget constraints, and timezone/availability of the Wordpress resource, we were not able to deliver a working solution, but all artifacts were handed over at the conclusion of the project. If I could go back and do the project over, I would have recommended the center change to another website such as Wix or Squarespace that is more flexible, user friendly, and has more build-in capabilities that would suit their varying needs.
