Product Designer
Centre for Homelessness Impact
Mar. 2022 – Jun. 2022
Overview
The Centre for Homelessness Impact focuses on collating and commissioning research which examines the most effective ways to tackle homelessness. It commissions, conducts and evaluates research carried out in homelessness globally, finding ways to make applications on what works on the ground be effective in the locales they’re applied in.
Consequently, it is vital that the vast amount of research it covers is easily navigable and easy to understand for its varied audiences.
Problem
One of the challenges of the sites as it existed was that many of its pages were not optimised for the purposes they served. As a result, information pages had differing structures and lacked cohesion, while it wasn’t immediately clear what information was supposed to be extracted by users.
Furthermore, little attention had been given to the audience of these pages, and what problems they sought to solve by visiting the website, specifically its pages on the research it was cataloguing.
Process
A key area of focus was on enabling pages to be readable at length, and at varying resolutions. Given that a large portion our users I interviewed were researchers, practitioners or members of the press, it was important that the information presented be as digestible as possible.
Typography became an area of great interest to facilitate the re-design, with how it was used being a gateway to encouraging reading. Moreover, the use of media was encouraged as a mean of promoting story-telling through data.
Solutions and Results
One of my favourite parts of this project was the way in which so much could be done to improve the user experience of the website through typography considerations and UX best practice, without embarking on a complete re-design. On completion, the team was pleased with the new look and feel of the site, and helped re-galvanise the way the organisation approached communications and design.
Upon being surveyed, 84% of people preferred the new design for these pages, with an uptick in browsing session length of 40%.
Focusing on how users would make use of the information presented considerably increased how well I addressed their needs. This has cascaded down to the way my projects are undertaken, from research, to prototyping, testing and beyond,
84
Respondents Agree or Strongly Agreed the new design was an improvement.
40
Increase in length of browsing sessions
