Utah Manufacturer's Association
What is it like to be a UX team of one?
A contract project where I was assigned to be the web design intern to the marketing manager. We worked to redesign the current website to be easier to use. This project was able to give me real world experience by putting to the test, the skills I had learned in my UX courses. As the only one on my team with web design experience I was able to lead web design meetings with the marketing manager and present our work to the rest of the team and executives.
A UX Team of Two
This project required me to become a UX team of one. I was presented with a website that needed quite a bit of revamping not only on the front end, but the back as well. Utah Manufacturer's Association had already had two designs for their website, one proving to be unusable and the other being incomplete and not want the company had envisioned. UMA needed the site done quickly, but I wanted to make sure it was done correctly this time around. So I took them through a user-based, redesign approach. I had the freedom to choose the way the project progressed as the company set the deadline for their next business conference. The goal was to have the new site launch that day or to have a high fidelity prototype to present at the conference. Their marketing manager and I worked together as I shared my UX knowledge with her and she used her marketing knowledge with me. Below are the two homepages of the previous versions.
Phase 1 - User Research
Our first task was to conduct some user research tasks our team needed to accomplish before we could begin our redesign. We wanted to discover the real problems with the site besides just the look and feel of the design. We wanted to make sure that we were not only giving the old site a new look but really improving the usability of the site and solving the users' problem. In order to do this, it was necessary to find the true goals of both the company and the users so that the new design could hopefully achieve both. Our team of two began with site content audits, stakeholder interviews, and a user survey.
The decision to do a site content audit was necessary because the old site had so much to it and really needed a new organization. Once we were able to see what we have we could then begin to understand what the user actually needed from the website. This site content audit led us to conduct a user survey. Since the old site contained so much content we wanted to know how often users visited the site and for what. One of the biggest things we learned from our user survey was that we had the assumption that more people were using the site to renew memberships when in our results we were able to see that using member resources and learning about member benefits were what members were using the site for most often.
On the company side we conducted a Project Assumptions activity in order to identify a problem and then to create a goal statement to help guide our design process. By taking our research and applying it to problem solving as a team we came up with a goal statement for the website. Every time we came to a making new decisions for site we tied back our decisions to the goal statement debating whether or not our decisions were accomplishing our goal. It became our strategy.
On a personal note, the biggest challenge that I learned from in this phase was that user research can be seen as unnecessary or time consuming. I was able to conduct meetings with the team and what I had to learn was that in order to make the work seem worthy of our time is to be able to show the value our user research had in our design process and why it was better than what had previously been delivered. It helped me to realize the importance of the user research because without it, you aren't truly solving the deeper problems which in the end could cause more problems.
Below are some of the deliverables from this phase.
Check out our
user survey!
Phase 2 - Design
Constraints came to the surface as we began Phase Two. Time became our biggest constraint as the project went on during this phase. As a member meeting was approaching we had about 2 months to get the website ready to demonstrate at the virtual event. As we were considering what should be our deliverable at the event we realized our final goal would be a finished website, however I believed I wouldn't be able to code a brand new website in time. I decided the best way I could be useful was to deliver a prototype making sure to include user and company needs while making sure the design achieved our goal statement we had worked on. This prototype could shown at the virtual event and give stakeholders an idea of what the site would be like once completed. I also planned on creating the prototype in Figma so the design could be passed onto a developer who could see out the implementation process.
We did a Heuristic Markup on the old site and began cutting unnecessary pages and making comments on what content should be included moving forward. This proved to be one of the most important parts of the process making sure that important parts of the site were being updated or reexamined on their necessity. We also brought the heuristic markup before the stakeholders to make sure that their needs were also met. This was able to create conversation between the web design team and other departments on what needed to be included on the site from a company perspective. One of the biggest decisions that came from this markup process was that I decided the login feature was unneeded. It created more of a hassle on the maintenance end because of the amount of people who had issues with logging in on the previous site. The only reason members were logging in were to renew their membership which in the future was going to be done through a different process. I was able to make the case for this decision in a team meeting and it was decided that the log in feature would not be included in the new site.
We began sketching/wireframing what we desired the new site to be like. I was able to teach my other team member what it's like to create a website prototype and how I approach this part of the process having done a few redesigns in the past (See UVU CET Redesign).
As it turns out stakeholders wanted to expedite the implementation process as quickly as possible and so our UX team of two decided it may be best to bring on a developer sooner than originally planned. Already having most of the sketching, site mapping, and style guide done we wanted someone who would take what we had been working on and be able to flesh out these wireframes.
I was able to interview different developers and explain to them our problem and how we were approaching the solution to hire someone to help us in our process. We hired a team out of Georgia who could do what we needed in the time remaining. We were able to meet virtually and email back and forth containing sketches, content, and other design communication. The main reason we decided to work with this company was because since UMA doesn't have a full-time website developer who is in charge of keeping the site updated. This company offered to update the site monthly and train my other team member so that after my internship was completed she would be able to make updates to the site on her own.
Hiring this company also helped us to expedite the design and implementation because they offered to design just based off the wireframes we had created and we were able to meet with them to make changes before our deadline. It helped me to feel like I was leaving the company in good hands even after my internship would be completed. After my initial UI designing had been completed and turned over to our developers I was able to become more of a Product Manager of the web development process.
Below are deliverables from this phase including sketches, sitemaps, and whiteboard sessions.
Phase 3 - Launch and Conclusion
After a few iterations and meetings back and forth with developers the site was ready to be launched. My time as a consultant on the project came to a close and my internship was coming to a close. I felt confident that I was able to help UMA lay the foundations of a better performing website for themselves and their members. I've been able to have a few key takeaways from working on this project. The first being the opportunity to lead the design process. I was able to gain some valuable experience from working with different department heads, advocating user needs, teaching my team how to conduct a redesign process. The other key takeaway from this project was the opportunity to work alongside developers in real-time. In the past projects I've worked on followed a more traditional approach with a significant hand-off of a design to a developer however in this project I was able to follow a more Agile team framework meaning that at each part of the design process we had the ability to double check the product's development alongside the stakeholders and the developers. If I would have had more time to work on this project I would have conducted another user survey to see what reactions were to the updated website. I would have also like to conduct a eye-tracking test to see the new site through members' eyes.
You can see the new website live at this link! Click here.