After nearly a year on the project, Community Coalition has launched the new design for their website. I am happy that I had the opportunity to participate in this process. Despite the longer than expected timeline to complete the project, I gained valuable experience and learned a lot of things on my journey as the team’s UX and graphic designer.
Lessons learned
- People come from different backgrounds and have different experience to bring to the table. Take advantage of this diversity.
- When working with people, things can take longer than expected. But…
- Be patient and enjoy the ride.
- The organization knows their users best, or at least assume that they do, so trust what they tell you.
- Be empathetic, even if you don’t think you can completely relate to the user.
- Working together helps the overall understanding.
UX deliverables created
- Wireframes
- Personas
- Interviewing stakeholders
- Competitive analysis
- High fidelity mockups
- Process and user flows
- Content inventory, analysis and strategy
- Information architecture and taxonomy
Takeaways
- You get out of it what you put in. If you put in more, you can get very valuable assets.
- Be willing to learn from others. You learn more by keeping your ears open and mouth shut.
- Keep technology in mind. Not all users are on a high speed device with quick internet access.
- Do you best to get the organization to clean up items that are not being used on the site. Analytics is a great tool to validate this cause.
- Try to tell the organization’s story. The more you learn about them, the easier this is to do.
- Have fun and enjoy giving back to the community.
