CCHA Website Redesign
The Canadian Congenital Heart Alliance (CCHA) is a grassroots, volunteer-run charity that supports over 257,000 Canadians living with Congenital Heart Disease (CHD). Their mission is to advocate for and enrich the lives of people with CHD through awareness, education, research and support.
THE CHALLENGE
The CCHAs' website needed a redesign, as board members found their website was hard to navigate, clutter-some, and felt like the platform design was stuck in the 2000's. There were a high number of user drop off rates which lead to many users not returning. They wanted a layout designs they could easily be edited and customized by their faculty while maintaining a cohesion throughout the platform.
THE PROCESS
We began understanding our client's users' through key research methods. I lead stakeholder interviews with CCHA board member's to learn about issues with their website. From those interviews, I was able to turn that information into user personas. I also wrote a heuristics report on the live site, highlighting outdated fonts / icons, missing / dead links along with hierarchy issues. We utilized user testing on the current site, to learn how difficult it was for users to navigate and find key pages for information about their defect. We used card sorting of all the menu options to create a condensed, simplified menu options. Lastly, we created a new site map that was much more efficient and used language that users would understand.
We took what we learned from our research and began designing a series of lo-fi and eventually hi-fi wireframes after getting board member feedback on the lo-fi designs. The CCHA members chose my design to be used for their new website. I prepared the new CCHA website design by applying some quick prototyping methods to the new design for another round of user tests. This time, it was to ensure our new design resonated with CCHA users and made navigating the site much easier.
CONCLUSION
I gained a lot of experience while working on this project. I lead weekly meetings with the client and my team to discuss our progress and received / give feedback on design elements and page layouts. I facilitated stakeholder interviews with CCHA board members, which was challenging to get valuable information our of some board members. I enjoyed the challenge of creating a layout that was simple enough for users to navigate but contain such heavy, complex content. I really had to focus on designing with the users needs in mind while creating a beautiful interactive product.
I enjoyed collaborating with my team as we communicated effectively while we all work remotely. We communicated through zoom calls daily updating one another on information and which portions of the projects we had to finish, delegated to one another and worked off our strengths. I was extremely happy with the final outcome and even more happy knowing that we made the client happy, as we all came together to help deliver a functional product to CCHA users to enjoy.
