A for Amanda

My role

I completed UX and UI work for this client project as part of the RED Academy User Experience Designer Professional program. I worked closely with the other designers at all stages of the process.

Context and project goals

Evans Lake wanted a website redesign to improve their navigation and increase click through from the home page.

Evans Lake is a camp and outdoor forest education facility that is also available for private events. There is a lot of good content on the existing website, but people had trouble navigating it. It needed to be streamlined and better organized. They also want to update the look and feel and improve on the experience for those viewing information on smaller devices.

Research

To develop a deeper understanding of Evans Lake customers we conducted a survey and user interviews to build personas to guide our designs.

In the client kickoff meeting, we were able to identify that the primary users were parents of children attending camp and the secondary users were teachers or couples getting married who were looking to book a venue. Since we were unable to pull any analytics off the existing website, we focused our research on understanding the different user groups and the domain of kids camp. Through a survey and interviews we discovered people’s favourite aspects of Evans Lake and top factors they considered when deciding to choose Evans Lake for a private event or kids camp. With this information we created two personas representing parents who send their kids to camp and someone looking to book the venue.

Key findings

• Photos were an important factor in the decision making process for all groups
• Parents were unable to find the registration table on when camps sessions are available
• Parents required information (photos, staff bios, etc.) to help determine the safety of their children at camp
• People like detailed descriptions of what activities are available at camp
• People preferred to call and contact Evans Lake for additional details or questions
• Finding the venue capacity and availability is one of the first things that people must do when planning an event (booking the venue)

Ideation and iteration

Improving the information architecture was one of our top priorities.

We started off reviewing the existing content. Based on our research and personas we created a new structure and tested this through one-on-one closed card sorting with our users. From there we were able to finalize a site map that the majority of people were able to navigate. We then did a design studio to develop ideas on how to display large amounts of content found on the website. We were able to decrease the number of pages from 48 to 29. Our UI designer created a style guide through collaboration with the client. I was then able to also assist in creating some webpages based on the style guide.

Next steps

The design was chosen to be developed by the RED Academy Web Developer Professional students. We provided them with documentation and the assets to create the site on wordpress and also worked with them to resolve any issues with the design feasibility.