A federally funded national project, AdoptUSKids provides child welfare professionals from all states, tribes, and territories access to free tools, training, and other resources to help them improve services to children and families.
AdoptUSKids had at one point maintained a website targeted to a narrow audience of child welfare administrators and managers but it was sunset due to that project ending in 2017. The termination of the National Resource Center for Digital Recruitment at AdoptUSKids (NRCDR) presented a new opportunity for AdoptUSKids to develop a new website that would serve a broader audience of child welfare professionals that included family caseworkers, child caseworkers, administrators, managers, and tribal administrators and managers.
The primary objective was to design and build a new website on a blogging platform and integrate it with the current AdoptUSKids digital architecture. The team determined the site would be developed in two major phases. In the first phase we would launch the MVP. The MVP would largely be based on the code of another website the team had recently launched. In the second phase, based on further research and testing, we would continue to develop features and make enhancements.
I was part of a small multidisciplinary team tasked with leading design and user experience. I collaborated and assisted with research, user testing, and quality assurance testing.
RESEARCH & DISCOVERY
Since the new website would serve the full spectrum of child welfare professionals, I reviewed our professional personas to better understand possible goals and frustrations. Professional personas included family caseworkers, child caseworkers, administrators, managers, and supervisors, and tribal administrators, managers, and supervisors.
Example goals for professionals:
Example frustrations for professionals:
The team also analyzed findings and opportunities from a recent customer journey mapping workshop and sought to leverage that information to guide content strategy, user experience, and information architecture.
From our customer journey mapping results analysis we:
I researched websites in the nonprofit and government sectors to evaluate strengths and weaknesses. I conducted brief usability audits to understand design, content strategy, and usability efforts. The insights gained from these evaluations helped me focus on successful practices and avoid common usability and accessibility issues.
DESIGN
We knew that the information architecture would be key to the success of the blog website because we learned from customer journey mapping that many workers had very limited time in their days for information finding and consumption. Led by the product owner, the team utilized various UX methodologies and I used those findings for creating wireframes.
Websites created on blogging platforms rely heavily on how categories, subcategories, and tags are used for organizing the content. The team conducted an affinity mapping exercise to organize all the possible topics and labels to be considered.
We created a user stories table to help us think about the website from the user’s perspective and help ensure that we planned everything we wanted the site to accomplish, so that the wireframe would be accurate and complete.
From affinity mapping we were able to narrow our list of category labels. We conducted card sorting sessions to see how users would group topics and category labels. Participants were recruited to complete an unmoderated card sorting session hosted on Optimal Workshop. We used this tool to help determine final category and subcategory labeling for the information architecture.
Coming out of the research phase, we identified the first iteration of the information architecture and main components of the homepage.
The wireframes showed the navigation, information hierarchy, and where each of the main content components would fall on the homepage and other pages.
The next step was testing our baseline approach. I created a low-fidelity testing prototype and assisted in the planning.
Participants were recruited to complete an unmoderated “first-click test” hosted on Optimal Workshop.
Some common tasks we asked users to complete:
From the testing phase we moved on to the final MVP design. The high-fidelity prototype included all the visual design elements and the final color palette. In addition to the MVP prototype, I also designed what would have been the next iteration of the homepage.
Due to resourcing and time constraints, we never fully engaged in the second phase of design and development. All except one future feature had to be sidelined. Iterative design after MVP launch was not considered a priority and the team had to move on to new projects.
