Society for Technical Communication Website Redesign
My Role: Designer & Researcher
Timeframe: 5 weeks
Methods: Research, Personas, Design, Usability Testing, Prototyping
Tools: Zoom, Miro, Figma
Introduction:
The Society for Technical Communication (STC) is a professional organization for people in the technical communication field. The STC Board has recently wanted to put more effort into its website. I evaluated the current website and redesigned several STC web pages. The STC website is run by volunteers; this was important to keep in mind during this project, as we needed to keep the design simple and easy to maintain.
The Problem:
The current STC site has received a lot of complaints about being out of date and difficult to navigate. My team and I evaluated the site to determine the pain points the users may be having, a designed a prototype to solve these issues.
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Project Plan:
Before starting this project, my team and I brainstormed and developed a plan.
Interviews and Usability Testing:
We reached out to people in the Technical Communication field and interviewed them with questions regarding STC. We also conducted a usability test on the current STC website.
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Through interviews and testing, we were able to identify several issues users are having:
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Pages are length,y and words
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Lack of visuals throughout the page
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Overwhelming homepage
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The top navigation bar is difficult for us
Based on the interviews and usability test, we developed this persona.
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Redesign:
After identifying the issues within the site, we began the redesign process. We translated the ideas into wireframes to lay out everything before we began to work on a high-fidelity prototype.
For this design, we focused on:
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Adding more white space to the site
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Making the site design and layout more consistent
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Fixing the visual hierarchy and shortening text
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Adding more visuals
Usability Testing
We tested our prototype with three partcipants. The assessment methods included:
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Pre-test: To gauge users through processes prior to the usability test
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Usability Testing: when users/partcipants interacted with the site
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Think Aloud-Protocol​
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Task Completion
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Post-test interview: to gain deeper understanding of partcipants' feedback​
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"It's all easily accessible, in a matter of a couple of clicks I can get to whatever I need to."
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"It's pretty straight forward. I don't expect that anyone would have a problem following this format."
Conclusion:
​With these recommendations implemented, the STC site users will:
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Have an overall better user experience
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Have an easier time finding relevant articles
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Be able to easily access resources in the TCO field
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You can view a prototype of a project: