Pro Bono UX Volunteering for Rowan Alba
Rowan Alba is a charity that helps homeless people and alcoholics in and around Edinburgh.
Their previous website was rushed and a lot was compromised to get it over the line. Post-launch they had no in house capabilities or any budget remaining to receive ongoing support to resolve critical issues on the site. As I volunteered with the charity already as part of CARDS (Community Alcohol Related Damage Service), I offered to help out with improving the UX of their website as part of the 2 days volunteering Whitespace offers. A colleague generously offered 2 days as well to help with the development.
I am so proud of what we achieved in such a short period of time.
Rowan Alba are delighted with the new improved web site kindly created with the support of white space. The team that helped us seemed to intuitively understand what we were about, and our new web site now reflects that. As a small charity with no budget for marketing , this would have been impossible without their enthusiastic and generously donated time, skill and energy. Thank you very much.
Helen Carlin, CEO Rowan Alba
Background
In Celtic mythology, the Rowan tree was known as the Travellers’ Tree, because it prevented people on a journey from getting lost. Rowan Alba began with Thorntree Street 12 years ago providing secure tenancies to older people who have had a history of homelessness and a long term history of problematic alcohol use.
Ewan Law, Training and Learning Coordinator
Kick-off
Before any work can take place on the website, we met with a representative of Rowan Alba to discuss their current pain points with the website and what they wish to achieve.
We discussed and highlighted the main purposes of the website:
Donations
Sales/Promotion of Learning Centre products
Promotion of the organisation, and its events
Promotion/Attracting of CSR support/business
Recruitment of Volunteers/Volunteer information
Project overview
Conduct User Testing
Recruit a minimum of 5 test users. They should preferably unfamiliar with the Rowan Alba website.
Information Architecture Review
Accessibility Assessment
Ideation
Creative/Branding
Sketching
Prototype
Implement
Provide CMS training for staff
Review
Monitor statistics
Run another user testing workshop
Follow-up with Rowan Alba staff
User Testing
In order to validate our assumptions of the highlighted issues and gain user insights, I will be conducted user testing pre website development. This user testing also informed how we prioritise the issues, especially due to the tight time constraints. I also conducted another session of user testing post website development to assess if we were successful in achieving our key goals.
As such, I developed task based scenarios for each of the 5 user groups:
Volunteer
In need of help
Staff
Potential purchaser of training
Donor
What we delivered
SSL Enforcement
Accessibility issues due to poor contrast (improved readability)
Embedded a Twitter feed which displays properly and is easy to find on the homepage and the News & Events page (https://rowanalba.org/what-we-do/news-events/)
Removed the multiple Social Media 'quick click links', which were unnecessary and confusing
Combined News & Events. We also removed the dates on the CTA blocks for news & events, so that the homepage would not look dated.
Improved the websites user experience for front end users
Performed an 'Information Architecture' review and provided a total restructure of the sites organisation, so that key content would not be 'buried' and content would be easier to find
Created reusable components
Provided CMS training and guide on how to utilise pre-built templates. We felt in order to improve ongoing maintenance by Rowan Alba staff, the best way forward to educate the staff on how to use the Wordpress CMS.
In addition, we also added:
A homepage header video
Site search
Improved donation form
Implemented Access Keys for accessibility
Improved mobile experience
Improved footer
Improved URL structure