Overview

• Volunteer initiative during the peak lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA.
• Sponsored by Code for America.
• Faced unique challenges due to remote collaboration and rapid changes in community needs

Background

• Organization: NC COVID Support, a local Code for America chapter initiative.
• Function and Vision: Community-driven platform facilitating COVID-19 support, prioritized for accessibility, user-friendliness, mobile optimization, and multilingual availability.
• Specific Goals: Targeted a multilingual audience to enhance inclusivity and aimed to increase engagement by 25% through improved accessibility.

Focus

• Design Research and Alignment: Conducted user interviews and extensive research to establish a clear UX vision that resonated with stakeholder goals.
• Stakeholder Engagement and Collaboration: Hosted bi-weekly sessions to align requirements, track feedback via shared documentation, and secure buy-in.
• Cross-Platform User-Centric Design: Created adaptable designs for mobile and desktop interfaces within accessibility (ADA) standards.
• Competitor and Pattern Analysis: Utilized UI pattern research and UX audits to guide strategic design decisions.
• Resource Sharing and Coordination: Employed Figma to efficiently share assets and collaborate with the design team.

Purpose

• Strategic Objective: Address the inefficiencies of the initial site, which was challenging to navigate on mobile devices.
• Critical Need: The existing platform had a 40% user drop-off rate, and 60% of users accessed the site via mobile devices.
• Goal: Develop a reliable, responsive platform that scales community impact by enhancing accessibility to localized services.

Team

• Role: UX Advisor / UX Strategy Lead.
• Responsibilities: Oversaw design research, conducted heuristic evaluations, defined user problems, documented meeting insights, and aligned project requirements with engineering.
• Influence: Spearheaded the integration of user feedback into iterations, boosting satisfaction by 30%, and facilitated cross-functional workshops to harmonize UX strategy with technical feasibility.
• Team: Collaborated with another UX advisor, project lead, and engineering director.

Scope

• Project Duration: Initiated in May 2020 with ongoing developments and monthly milestones.
• Strategic Constraints: Managed robust backend data integration challenges and inherited new datasets while navigating the need for better mobile navigation.
• Management Strategies: Implemented a sprint-based approach and utilized Trello to maintain clear timelines and deliverable checkpoints.

Execution

• Comprehensive Discovery and Documentation: Led heuristic evaluations, focus groups, and competitive analysis to illuminate requirements.
• Strategic Product Planning: Envisioned intermediate redesign solutions centered on interactive, dual-function map/list features.
• Iterative Design Strategy: Crafted initial user flows, wireframes, and design iterations in Figma, focusing on card views and micro-interactions.
• Response to Insights: Discovered through testing that users favored the dual-function map/list feature, prompting a focus shift.

Outcomes

• Visual Strategy Impact: Visual concepts energized stakeholders and served as a means for volunteer and partner recruitment.
• Lessons Learned: Validated the importance of a mobile-first approach, clear functionality to address cognitive overload, and the necessity for trustworthy, easily translatable information.
• Learning Reinforcement: Emphasized the importance of strategic adjustments based on continuous user feedback and aligning design research with stakeholder objectives.