The California Strategic Growth Council Redesign
Overview
The California Strategic Growth Council coordinates with California communities, public agencies, and funding partners to help meet goals around sustainability, equity, and building a healthy thriving California.
My Role
Brand Identity
Visual Design
Human-Centered Design
UI/UX Designer
Front End Development
The Strategic Growth Council Website
The Strategic Growth Council (SGC) was established in 2008, and the website gone through many updates, growth, and changes since then. The website lacked organization and structure from the growth of SGC and the user experience needed to be reconsidered. I conducted user interviews with our primary users (SGC staff working with communities) to uncover pain points with the current website environment.
My research included:
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Identifying the needs from SGC programs and teams.
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Learn how to amplify SGC’s purpose and resources.
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Use insights to help build out the future roadmap that makes the website more accessible for program staff and communities.
Previous design of the SGC homepage
Gathering Insights
After conducting user interviews, and sending out surveys to SGC leadership, staff, and community partners, I grouped these findings into common themes and areas where we could improve the experience.
After gathering the feedback and data from the website analytics, I translated this into actionable next steps which included developing a site map of where the site can go and telling a story through focusing on the business impact.
Prioritizing the users needs
From the focus groups, I used this qualitative data to report back to leadership who our key users were and why this new implementation of the website would help them navigate to what they needed from SGC.
Developing user personas helped tell the story of who our key users were and what information would be useful to shaping the SGC website in the future.
Wireframing a solution
Based on the findings and problems from above, I took the research and starting applying this to the user interface. I used the atomic design methodology and broke the design into atoms, molecules, organisms, templates, and pages. This allowed the design to form modules that the user could then use as building blocks on new or exisiting pages.
Results and takeaways
Since the redesign of the Strategic Growth Council website, we have had less complaints about staff needing to update material pages and where their content should go. We have now migrated the entire website from an HTML website into a CMS where staff can also make changes and still using the modules developed during the design process.
Some key takeaways from this project are:
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Meeting the staff and communities first. With this mindset, we were able to understand the users needs and focus on the sitemap and structure.
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User feedback and testing. Putting our users first, and allowing them time to use the product in development allowed us to to improve the end user experience.
