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Shonquille 

LostValley

Non-profit organization

LostValley The community is comprised of resident staff, other renters, and volunteers.  Since 1989, Lost Valley has been a place for experiential learning through community development, formalized educational programs, and volunteer opportunities and is located in Eugene, Oregon.
Problem The current lostvalley.org website is not engaging its target users with easily findable and relevant content.  Additionally, the website is not attracting their target audience consistently; 20-30 somethings that have interests in sustainable living, alternative energy, and urban gardening.
Goal The current site's primary purpose is to communicate the resources available to the Pacific Northwest community and secondarily support their non-profit through donations collected on the website.  
Solution Improved Information Architecture, Intuitive and mobile-friendly UI redesign, branding, and overall visual consistency.
Tools Figma, Miro
Method Design Thinking Process, Content & Competitor Analysis, Usability Studies, Testing, Interviews, Affinity Diagramming, Card Sorting,  A/B testing, Design and Branding Strategy
Role UX Researcher, Designer (Team of 3)

Overview

The Lostvalley.org website is a WordPress-hosted site serving sustainable living, alternative energy, and urban gardening enthusiasts with educational content and services. The primary audience for this site is 20 to 30-somethings, with a few older users.  The lostvalley.org website’s content architecture is suboptimal, and some links are non-functional. The site’s navigation visual treatment is inconsistent or broken.

Desktop Lo-fi 

The purpose of this project was to: 

  • Improve the information architecture and user flow 

  • Eliminate redundant links and content to simplify navigation

  • Develop visual and content consistency

The Process

My team of 3  ran a qualitative and quantitative method on the Design Thinking Methodology. 

Empathy and Design 

Learning about the organization (its goals, values, and the community that it served) through an in-depth content analysis was a good starting point for research. We decided to create an empathy map from ( browsing Lostvalley.org website). 

Recruitment and task:

  • Interview individuals that are interested in sustainable living, alternative energy, and/or urban gardening.

  • Gender: 50/50

  • Ethnicity: Mix

  • Device: Laptop and Mobile

  • Duration: 20-30 minutes each

  • Task: Fiding the About section of the organization,  Residency Education Programs, and Donate and support. 

Through UI annotations and Heuristic Evaluations we learned:

  • Website wide content redundancies

  • Visual inconsistencies in terms of spacing, white space, photography, iconography, and typography 

  • Overall website and its elements don't comply with gestalt laws of UI

  • The current color palette failed color testing

  • Redirection to the same page from different buttons

Usability Studies: The goal of conducting in-person interviews with 8 participants helped us further empathize with users and identify their main pain points. Participants were asked to perform a set of tasks on the website.

Ideate

We began gathering and analyzing all the data from our preliminary research, interviews, and usability testing. We undertook the Affinity Diagramming method (as a team) to categorize our findings. We also conducted an I like/I wish/What if activity with our participants to help in creating a Feature Prioritization model that we eventually incorporated in our design strategy. 

User insight

The key insights we learned:

  • Users felt that the importance of the website should be about us and the programs

  • Most of the users were between the age range of 20-30 who were interested in sustainable living

  • Believes that the website should be detailed and attractive to the consumer online

  • Did not like the ascetics of the website.

  • the information is too wordy. 

User Persona: The research analysis also helped in building our persona as a representative reference point for future project development. 

  New Style Tile and Design System
Logo Redesign by teammate Josh Dinsdale*

Lo-fi Prototype: After multiple versions of sketches, we made 2 versions of the lo-fi prototype and 

 A/B testing. We then incorporated feedback and recommendations into our final hi-fi prototype. 

Shetches 

Hi-fi

After multiple revisions, we decided to keep the original logo. 

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