Education Program Website
Six week sprint
UX Researcher
UX Designer
Figma
G Suite
The team at Good Fun Stuff (GFS) wanted help making their current website more user friendly for their customers with an emphasis on their program offerings and means to contact them for potential customers.
The business model for GFS relies on potential families to reach out directly to inquire about program offerings. Because of this, a large focus of the design fell on accessibility to contact, as well as accurately presenting the program offerings and formats that make up GFS.
The intersecting goal between GFS and UX involves creating a seamless experience for their customers when navigating their website. Other minor goals included updating program offerings, adjusting visual layouts, and making site navigation more intuitive.
The team at GFS was able to procure a list of local services that offered similar experiences to their own to look at for C&C analysis. These comparisons ranged from activities like dance, kung-fu, mountain biking, and carpentry.
These comparisons gave a backdrop for how similar businesses are presenting information about their programs on their website to keep in mind as I moved forward into the research and design phases.
After getting a lay of the land with similar businesses through C&C analysis, I wanted to spend some time looking at the current product to get a sense of the website as it was.
This was a “first look” assessment of some of the areas in which design principles can be leveraged to create a more fluid experience for users prior to having any conversations with people, usability testing, or designing any solutions.
You can see some of the key takeaways from the Design Critique below:
There are some great elements here with the visuals and the Mission Statement, however other pieces like the location of the Spanish option and the newsletter signup create clutter on the landing page.
While all the information you may need to determine if GFS is right for your kids, the way it is presented could be made a bit more intuitive for people searching for pricing information.
This page has a lot of really great information for users including pictures and blurbs about the people behind the program. Initial assessment of this page had more to do with continuity with image sizing and text alignment.
The contact form fell in a similar assessment as the about us page in that it's a great feature to have for user's, but having it accessible across all pages would help for easy navigation in the case a user is on a separate page but needs to quickly make contact.
Testing involved putting the live website in front of people, having them navigate the website both naturally as well as through guided discussion and questioning about where they would navigate to to find certain pieces of information.
The key takeaways from usability testing were that information was generally difficult to understand, specifically with the program offerings and the format in which that content was being delivered.
While some visual elements and design choices were found to be appealing to users, there was a general sense that continuity across pages could be better and visual hierarchy could be leveraged to make information on pages easier to locate and understand.
Before getting too far into the design process, there were certain parameters I had to keep in mind based on the business goals, and resources available. The current website was designed using Google Sites which presented some unique challenges in the design phase. The decision was made to remain on Google Sites based on GFS's current business goals and scale.
If given more time on this project, there are a few next steps I would look to focus on building upon:
Coming Soon!
