Throwing Rocks…
Making Ripples.
I’d like to tell you a story… A story about a three year old boy… named Josiah. Josiah had four other siblings. Three older and one younger. Little Josiah was your average run of the mill boy. He liked to run and play in the yard. He had a scooter that he liked to zoom around on in the driveway. He would ride that thing for hours. Josiah was active to say the least. He never sat still… and his parents were ok with that.
One pastime he and his siblings would enjoy doing on family outings… was throwing rocks. You see his family loved the water. Everywhere they went was by some sort of body of water. Lakes, rivers, streams, the ocean. If there was water, they wanted to be near it, and in it. On these family outings the kids would throw rocks all day if their parents would let them… they’d throw for distance, they’d throw for accuracy… they’d skip rocks. That was their thing.
One day, Josiah’s parents started to notice something about little Josiah… He started to walk a little differently. He developed a limp in his right leg. He had a hard time walking up and down the stairs. Something wasn’t right with Josiah. A few weeks later his hand started to drop. He couldn’t hold his cereal bowl without his hands shaking… what was happening? The doctors didn’t know, and exam after exam gave no answers. Every outing after these events Josiah walked with a limp. His dad had to help him walk, his dad carried him from place to place. They would get to wherever it was that they were going and they’d sit little Josiah down and he would pick up where he left off.
*ker-plink… ker-plank… ker-plunk*
He threw rocks while his brothers and sisters ran off to play tag or something like that… he couldn’t run anymore. Tears welling up in Josiah’s parents eyes, what was happening? What was wrong? Days turned into weeks and weeks into a few months and then they finally had an answer… Josiah had a large, slow growing, tumor in his brain. His right side was shutting down bit by bit as the golfball sized tumor and softball size mass of fluid was pushing on the left side of his brain…
Fast forwarding a few months and Josiah is in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia recovering from brain surgery and learning how to walk again. He’s a fighter this little boy… he’s making strides every day. He’s not giving up. We, I mean wouldn’t let him. Why am I starting off this case study with this sad but true story? You see this story is about my son Josiah, and he’s five now, and he’s moved on with his recovery. The only remnants of this ordeal is a six inch scar on the left side of his head, some blurred vision on the bottom side of his right eye, and the fear of this happening again. This, my friends, is every parents worst nightmare and this story is played out in every city and in every town, and hits almost every single one of us. So with this story in the back of your mind, I’d like to shift gears now and talk about how we can help your organization and make some modifications on your amazing website.
First Steps- Research…
The first order of business was for our team to reach out to the public and see who would be our target user to begin the redesign process. We sent out a screener survey to over 30 people ranging in age from 23 to 73. We had a wide variety of individuals who responded to our questionnaire. After the survey was finished, we put all of our results into a spreadsheet. Out of the 36 people that took our screener survey, we conducted usability tests on 7 people who matched our criteria. Due to the busy schedule and distance of some of our selected participants, some of the interviews were conducted via phone call.
After we sifted through the data we noticed that there were a few different potential user bases that might interact with the St. Jude Children’s Hospital website that we could look into.
- People whose children had been patients at a children’s hospital.
- People who have donated or want to donate.
- People who have volunteered or want to volunteer.
The screener survey helped us identify a group of people who had either volunteered or donated and had children, some of whom had been to a hospital or had children who were in the hospital.
So now we were ready for our next step in our design process.
Synthesis…
The interviews were productive as we gathered a lot of data to filter through. As we sorted out the observations from our conversations we began to notice some trends forming via our affinity mapping method. Two trends in particular stood out to us and they are shown below…
From here we gained some key insights:
- People volunteered together or because other people they knew were volunteering.
- People were frustrated with a lack of transparency in website design for health websites in general.
- People had difficulty figuring out how to volunteer — they were worried about “red tape”, they didn’t think they had the time to navigate a cumbersome sign up project.
We took our synthesis and crafted a persona and a problem statement based around a 35 year old mother who wanted to volunteer with her friends and wanted a painless sign-up process. So back to the throwing rocks part. Now that we’ve met our persona, Eleanor… Eleanor has been touched by stories like Josiah, so much that she wants to reach out and throw a pebble… you notice I said pebble… she wants to give back and make an impact in someone else’s life, she wants the ripple of her time and energy and effort to reach someone else and make a difference in someone else's life. Eleanor wants to pass it forward. She cares, and she wants to volunteer. Eleanor then goes on to visit a children’s hospital website to see how she can give back. Even our smallest actions and effort can make ripples that are felt throughout the world.
Now that we have a person to relate our users with we also have a problem that we can help her with…
Our Problem Statement:
- People are motivated to volunteer when their friends and family are doing it too.
- Eleanor is spending a lot of time researching which volunteer opportunities she can participate in as a group, how might we help her find volunteering opportunities quickly?
Journey Mapping
So our target user we can now start the process of journey mapping. This exercise was done collaboratively on a whiteboard with several iterations. We tracked the user’s journey as they as they encountered barriers such as the fact that the volunteering opportunities within the site’s architecture was hard to find, the fact that only “group” volunteering took place in Tennessee clashed with our NY/NJ-base of interviewees, and the lack of a group or share option for the opportunities that were nearby.
Eleanor’s journey clearly shows that she starts off the process of attempting to find some volunteer events that she can participate in well and. From there she quickly digresses and begins to encounter many frustrations that will ultimately end in her “giving up”.
- Eleanor searches for opportunities to volunteer.
- She find a “donate” page via Google. (We don’t exactly want our users using outside sources to locate our pages.)
- She selects the group option but only sees options in Tennessee eventually finding one in NYC with NO group option.
- Eleanor gives up and searches for another hospital to volunteer at.
Also, one issue we noticed was that volunteering was not as prominently displayed as the donation options was. Some opportunities for us to consider in the redesign process are starting to form. We could 1. Reorganize the volunteering options for a more seamless route. 2. Add share buttons. 3. Get updates for other volunteering options from other organizations.
Testing…
Usability testing on the existing website reflected the journey map in that several users were confused by the Tennessee element, while others felt the entire process was overly confusing and complicated. There were too many steps in the process and some users couldn’t even find the process and figure it out. There were too many user flows having to do with volunteering. Also, there was with quite a bit of overlap with fundraising.
The site’s search function led to further confusion among users. One did not realize that there were no opportunities within 5 miles of her, thinking the problem was a lack of filtering on her part, and when she did get a result, it was confusingly labeled “1 out of 112 opportunities” even though none other were listed.
The lack of sharing functionality prevented all users from a one click option of inviting friends.
Design Studio
Based on these tests we made several changes to the website and began with a design studio to flesh out some ideas and see what we could come up with. We created some varying design concepts and iterated a few times until we came up with our final plans.
The first issue we identified from our usability tests was that users were having trouble figuring out where to sign up to volunteer.
We converged to the idea that a drop down menu to reveal a Volunteer button best simplifies and eliminates confusion on where to click in order to sign up to Volunteer
Mid-fi Prototype:
In regards to putting our designs to practice we came up with some ideas that we made in our first prototype. We made four noticeable, simple, and yet effective redesigns to your website so that Eleanor could easily navigate to those volunteer opportunities that she really wants to be a part of.
- Simplified the route to the volunteering sign-up page by condensing and simplifying the nav menu
- Created a second route to the sign up page by making the hero content a video with link buttons
- Changing the no results screen so that instead of nothing, it presented the closest opportunities, regardless of distance
- Added share icons to the volunteering results page, and the volunteering detailed results page
Mid-fi testing of these features showed some progress and some areas for improvement. These are highlighted below.
Regarding point 1:
Users were able to make progress with far fewer clicks.
Regarding point 2:
Not enough people recognized the new buttons so we recommended that we make them larger.
Regarding point 3:
The map screen threw users off. They did not realize they were on a no results page. They searched around the map and got stuck there.
As a result, we recommended that we change the “no results” page to more clearly say that no results were found and switch from a map to a list.
Regarding point 4:
The share button icons were a success with 3/5 users. However, one user mentioned that they preferred to copy and paste the link to send to friends.
Implementing:
Hi-fi Prototype:
We implemented the following changes for the Hi-Fi prototype:
- Changed the no results screen to have a list instead of a map
- Increased the size of the buttons on the hero content
- Added a copy link button to the results pages
Testing revealed that:
Point 1 was not entirely a successful fix, as several users did not realize the results they were getting were out of their search range
Point 2 was a success, as for the first time, users made it to the volunteering pages through this route as opposed to the nav menu.
Point 3 was a success, as every user was able to share or copy the link
Next Steps:
So what’s next? We feel that if we give users like Eleanor the option to see results beyond their search parameters, rather than supplying them automatically they will have a vastly different users experience than previous attempts.
We would also like to add a more robust “invite friends” functionality, whereby users can invite friends in real time as they sign up for events, rather than sharing the information through text, social media, etc.
And lastly we would like to overhaul the fundraising pages in a similar fashion to volunteering.
It is our aim to make your website the best website, not just for children’t hospitals but in general. We want Eleanor to visit your site, look for a volunteering event, share it with her friends and then give back families like mine who have gone through a life changing medical illness. Let the experience of visiting your website be a conduit to which people like Eleanor can really make a difference in a families life and send ripples of love their way.
Thank you.
Point 3 was a success, as every user was able to share or copy the link
