Website Redesign Discovery

As a contractor I was brand new to both Parkinson’s the organisation and Parkinson’s the disease. I ran a series of stakeholder interviews with teams across the organisation to understand how the organisation works, what their needs for the website are and what they know about users.

It quickly became apparent that different teams across the organisation had conducted at least 9 pieces of research that had not been widely shared. This included work on understanding the user, initial work by a previous UX Designer, a content audit and other in depth pieces commissioned by specific teams.

The team had also been running an onsite survey for 12 months before I joined but no one had been monitoring the responses. This contained a mix of qualitative and quantitative data that I worked with the Service Designer to analyse. This highlighted many areas of frustration for users but did not provide insight into which users were experiencing the frustration.

I used Google Analytics to understand traffic and engagement with the website content and Hotjar to review user engagement on certain pages in more detail.

I put together a report of everything we know so far combining all the existing research, new findings from the survey and quant data from GA and Hotjar. It showed us we knew more than we thought we did. The existing research highlighted several areas of concern and user pain points. It also provided a lot of insight and hypotheses about the different types of website users and why they were visiting the site. I played these back to the senior leadership team and many of them had no idea the problems existed.

Phase 2

Part 1: How can we better understand users, their needs and behaviours

I ran a workshop with the Service Designer and UX Designer where we used cluster analysis to find patterns in the information. The experience of the in house team provided context and together we were able to map needs, behaviours and insights across the Parkinson’s Journey.

The organisation had a way of looking at users but the data was telling us something different about our audience. I drafted revised user groups based on this data:

1. I created empathy maps and jobs to be done and continued to build these out during the discovery. 

2. I redesigned the onsite survey to start quantifying the responses according to the new user groups and learn more about which user groups were experiencing which frustrations. This in turn helped the team prioritise what would be worked on first. 

• I conducted user interviews and open card sorting exercises with 16 participants with a mix of People with Parkinson’s and People affected by Parkinson’s, and at different stages of Parkinson’s.

This enabled us to understand how users categorise and label the different types of website content and understand what content is important to them at what stage of their Parkinson’s journey and why.

I chose to combine card sorting with a user interview because of the target audience. All were unfamiliar with card sorting so running a remote study would not work. It also gave us the opportunity to probe and ask additional questions which provided qualitative insights on why people use the Parkinson’s website.

This initial period of desk research allowed us to take stock of where we were and understand where the gaps were.

I worked with the senior leadership team to prioritise the areas of concern and focus my efforts in conducting more in depth research to validate our hypotheses about who was using the site and why, and better understand the problems.

I replanned the discovery project with the following research questions:

• How can we better understand users, their needs and behaviours?

• How can we improve the navigation and information architecture to help users find what they are looking for quickly?

• How can we improve the donation and support journeys?

I chose to focus attention on People with Parkinson’s and People affected by Parkinson’s as the data was telling us this was the bulk of our users. Whilst many areas of the business wanted to focus on other groups, this felt like Parkinson’s UK’s ‘bread and butter’.

Part 2: How can we improve the navigation and information architecture to help users find what they are looking for quickly?

• I conducted GA analysis and set up reports for future. The team were not doing this and had no idea how content was performing

• I ran a kick off workshop with the content team to understand all the different types of content we have and why and create alignment between content and product teams. This also helped me understand how the organisation views the content and informed the labels we would use in the card sorting.

• I reviewed competitors to see how other charity organisations structured their content and balanced this with additional services such as forums, shop, donate and volunteer.