Fernside
Website Redesign
A national leader in grief support services, outreach, and education to the Greater Cincinnati community and beyond.
Project Overview
The website for the Fernside - Center for Grieving Children lacks thoughtful information architecture making it difficult for users to find the information they need to enroll in Fernside’s program.
The Impact:
Fernside is developing comprehensive support group information to help grieving families to be able to research programs on their own time and initiate the enrollment process. This will increase the enrollments by 50%.
The Problem:
An intuitive redesign that will users navigate through the website to find the information they need while helping serve Fernside’s mission.
The Solution:
Kelly Humphrey
Maddy Bernard
Jennifer Freese
UX Designers:
Tools:
Figma, Word Doc, Trello, Excel, Powerpoint
Timeline:
Empathize
We interviewed a stakeholder from Fernside and conducted user testing on the original website. These are our results.
50%
of families who reach out actually complete enrollment.
60%
of users could not locate the resources, and had difficulty using the primary navigation.
40%
of users requested a button to enroll for programs within the website.
7 to 8 Families
are reaching out to Fernside weekly about enrollment
expressed that they did not want to have to reach out by phone for more information. More information within the website was requested.
60%
Affinity Diagram:
User Persona
Analyze
We started by analyzing the layout of the current website and found there were several things that were hindering a great user flow and accessibility.
Hierarchy of information is out of touch with mission
Hero carousel is static
Secondary navigation is nearly nonexistent
Much of the information presented is redundant
The current design did not pass Accessibility Testing.
Define
People who are grieving and in need of support need to find the information to enroll while not having to call or spend a lot of time digging for the information because they are overwhelmed and dealing with the loss of the person who died.
User Insight:
Individuals are unable to find information on the services Fernside offers.
PainPoint 1:
Fernside’s website is currently not aiding in any enrollments to the program.
PainPoint 2:
Having more program information on the website will increase client engagement leading to higher enrollment.
Hypothesis:
Ideate
Competitor Analysis Findings:
Mission Statements
FAQs
Calendar
Inclusive
Prioritize Wish list
The Drawing Board:
Wire-Flow:
Prototyping
After preforming some user testing we learned:
Users had better ability to gather the information they needed.
Users were able to get better understanding of the programs and if they worked with their schedules
Users felt the site was more trustworthy
This information allowed us to then flesh out a more in-depth user flow and add our style guide to our final project.
Desktop Homepage
Mobile Homepage
Tablet Homepage
Desktop Navigation
Mobile/Tablet Navigation
Clickable Prototype
Final Thoughts
Through this website redesign, we improved the navigation, ensured color accessibility and consistency, and enabled online enrollment, aiming to boost Fernside’s enrollments and provide a more reassuring experience for individuals dealing with grief.
Key takeaways:
Users felt a sense of trust when seeing testimonials
Users feel more confident when they were able to research the information on their own time
Further development
Due to the tight timeline for this project we were left with a few thing we would have loved to factor into this project redesign
We wish time would have allowed for us to facilitate more user testing with individuals that would be using the website.
We also would have liked to have received more feedback from the Fernside contacts as well as other grieving support centers.