NAIGC Website Redesign
The National Alliance of Intercollegiate Gymnastics Clubs (NAIGC) is a non-profit organization that gives adult gymnasts in college or outside of college an opportunity to compete in men’s gymnastics, women’s gymnastics, trampoline or power tumbling. I have been personally a part of this organization for 7 years and wanted to find a way that I could contribute back to an amazing organization. When I viewed their website, I noticed some areas that could be confusing to some viewers. I then decided to conduct some research and create a mock up design to present to the leaders of the NAIGC program on how they can improve upon their site in order to make it more user friendly.
Overall, I learned a lot of important user experience concepts from this project. For this project, I did all of the work on my own and did not work in a group in order to complete the project which proved to be very difficult. I got a better understanding of the step by step process of how to evaluate a site and diagnose it in order to spot the issues that it is facing. I learned how to develop pre-survey and post-surveys in order to get a better perspective of how the user is feeling. I also learned how to conduct user testing in order to not evaluate the website, but to learn how to read the users and user their interactions in order to make improvements on the website. Finally, I also got the opportunity to develop a high-fidelity prototype of how I would like to change the site. I would love to continue to add onto my prototype and potentially present it to the board members who are in charge of the NAIGC website.
Heuristic Evaluation
To get a general idea of what I was working with, I ended up performing a heuristic evaluation on the NAIGC website in order to see what were some of the most problematic areas that the site was having in order to improve its usability. I ended up focusing on those areas of improvement later on. I also evaluated to see what areas were working as well.
User Research
For this project, I ended up gathering a few different people who were a part of the organization in order to conduct the testing phase. Some of the individuals were a part of my current club team, which is called Silicon Valley Gymnastics Club, as well as some individuals that were a part of other club teams that we have competed against. When conducting the scenario and task based surveying, I had held those meetings via Zoom to be able to watch not only how the user navigates through the current site, but to also observe their body language in order to get a better understanding of how they felt throughout the process. All of the research conducted was moderated by myself.
Personas
To get a general understanding of who my target audience was for the NAIGC website, I created a primary and secondary persona in order to get a better understanding of who the target audience was and what goals and needs they needed from the NAIGC website. Below are images that represent two of the different types of users that would be interacting with the site.
User Stories
In order to get a better understanding of some of the main users on the site, I created a few different user stories based on the primary, secondary, and tertiary users of the site. This gave me a better understanding of the goals of users for the site as well as the task that they need to perform. By getting this understanding, I developed my task and scenarios around the areas that they would be searching.
Usability Testing
Before conducting any user testing, I developed a test plan with the template below. From there I described what it is that I am going to be testing and my overall objective that I would like to achieve from my testing. I describe the general users of the site and the tasks and scenarios that they will be going through. I also mapped out a general time frame of how long I expect the interviews to actually take.
Prototype
After performing all of the research with the users and personal evaluation of the site, I created a high-fidelity prototype through Adobe XD of some of the areas that needed to be improved upon. This is the first iteration of the prototype. I would like to continue to test it and expand upon the redesign of the site. I have included some screenshots of the site below as well as the link to the functioning prototype for you to try it out.
Overall, I learned a lot of important user experience concepts from this project. For this project, I did all of the work on my own and did not work in a group in order to complete the project which proved to be very difficult. I got a better understanding of the step by step process of how to evaluate a site and diagnose it in order to spot the issues that it is facing. I learned how to develop pre-survey and post-surveys in order to get a better perspective of how the user is feeling. I also learned how to conduct user testing in order to not evaluate the website, but to learn how to read the users and user their interactions in order to make improvements on the website. Finally, I also got the opportunity to develop a high-fidelity prototype of how I would like to change the site. I would love to continue to add onto my prototype and potentially present it to the board members who are in charge of the NAIGC website.