Hayti Alumni Website Redesign
October 2020 - May 2021
Background
The active alumni group currently provides networking, scholarship, and mentorship opportunities to current students in the greater Hayti school district. Their website was in need of a website redesign to to create a digital learning environment that informs and inspires the HCHS community.
My Role
Principal UX Designer – Conducted UX Research and lead design solution for webstie.
The Team
Overseen by Rebecca Tegtmeyer
Principal Graphic Designer: Allyssa Harris
Principal Marketer: Todjanae Jones
Problem
The Hayti Alumni Association has never had a dedicated digital team to ensure the website preserved its historical roots, shared its story, and withheld the legacy of its membership. Our team of digital creators came together to redesign a digital learning community space for the very active Hayti Central School-Parent Chapter Alumni.
Process: User Research (Fall 2020)
Landscape Analysis
To begin our user research our team created a landscape analysis. The focus of our analysis was on the usability and design of those sites as related to the Hayti community. Additionally, the landscape analysis can help the Hayti Executive Board understand what kinds of designs, interactions, and expectations are already in place.
Our Findings: The information presented on the website had to tell the story of Hayti’s background, audience members appreciated an appealing design that is both engaging and easy to use, and the various forms of communication needed to be easy for users to find.
Audience Analysis
The audience analysis introduces the different personas involved in the HCHS Alumni Group. Our personas are fictional character’s based on research to represent members of the learning community. Our team looked at five experiential elements of a digital community to help us understand and analyze how individuals experience the Hayti community.
The Experiential Elements: Historical Consciousness, Agency, Life Goals, Relationships, and Organizational Structures.
Process: User Design (Spring 2021)
Low Fidelity Wireframes
With all of our user research completed the team moved on to the design phase of our project. We first started with creating low fidelity wireframes to share our personal ideas. I focused on creating pages focused on community like the Community Forum, Events, Alumni Directory, and Alumni Executive Board page. One of the challenges with creating these wireframes was trying to be as concise and clear with the different filters we wanted to include on the pages so the Hayti Alumni could easily find information from the past.
Process: User Design (Spring 2021)
Final Prototype
With all of our user research completed the team moved on to the design phase of our project. We created a prototype that had a strong sense of identity design through adding photos and videos that showcased the Hayti spirit. Additionally, while creating our prototype the team made sure to think about accessibility, as our main audience was part of the older demographic. As a result, when we had the Hayti community test our prototype we paid close attention to if they had any confusion to how sections and tabs were labeled, if pages seemed overcrowded or too empty, and if the community felt their history was being told as accurately as possible.
Final Outcome: Releasing the Redesigned Site (Spring 2021)
What I Learned
The Hayti Community is a group of Black individuals, whom many come from a low income background. One of my priorities in being Principle UX Designer in this project was to ensure I was listening and understanding the history behind the Hayti Community as I do not belong to this community. In this project, I was sure to acknowledge the privilege I had in being invited into conversations discussing how they saw their organization growing and why this website was important to them and their community.
With trying to understand and organize so much information handed to the team, it was easy to get overwhelmed by what we had to accomplish. To solve this problem, our team made sure to circle back to two values driving this project: Community and accessibility. This way whenever we were unsure about what decision to make we thought about which solution related back to the values the most.
Accessability is an important aspect ot keep in mind for any project. However, as the main audience for the Hayti website were individuals ages 50 and older, it was especially important to ensure the website was easy to use. To ensure our site was accessible we made sure to have contrasting colors and added alt text to the media shown on the website.