Project Overview

WHO IS

Speak with Joy is a platform that EMPOWERS women and youths to find hope in the midst of hardship and to provide realistic and applicable advice that would ultimately lead one to speak with joy despite life’s circumstances in the area of faith, purpose and relationships. Speak with Joy currently has a website that offers two services; life coaching and speaking engagements.

The Challenges

While Speak with Joy website provides great information about their brand, who they are and why they started; they are noticing the lack of engagement on their website. They are NOT getting a lot of traction which is causing the lack of individuals to either book a service or have knowledge of the services they provide.

Primary business needs we defined were:

Improves people’s understanding of what the brand offers
Improves people’s understanding of the booking process in a clear and simple way
Increase the engagement on the website

The Solution

Redesign their current website with an updated visual interface that aligns with the brand identity, provide easier access to services with a more simple and clear booking process with prominent CTA’s button and improve the visual hierarchy, grouping and typography. This would help establish a more user friendly website, increase engagement, improve people’s understanding of the services and overall improves people’s satisfaction which will empower more people to ultimately book with Speak With Joy.

My Design Thinking Process

Emphasis

Discovery

Before I could help Speak With Joy, I needed to UNDERSTAND the brand, the services they provide and their users. I wanted to gain a better understanding on how I could EFFECTIVELY address the business problems but also focus on the user experience and their pain points.

Uncovering Barriers

To understand Speak With Joy brand and the user experience, I interviewed REAL CUSTOMERS who either booked a services, purchased a book or interacted through their site.

Three Main Research Questions:

What are your FRUSTRATION about the current Speak With Joy website?
What MOTIVATES you to book a sevices with a professional?
What do you look for in a wellness type of website?

Key Findings

Understanding The Market

Usability Evaluation

Heuristic Evaluation Key Findings

The current website is inconsistent and confusing to navigate which is causing some frustrations to either book a services and/or engage with the site. Conducting the heuristic evaluation gave me better insights of identifying the usability problems that are making users struggle with a task or are not able to complete a task.

Define

Meet Anita and Shelley

Base on the patterns identified in my research, I came up with two personas that represents the ideal user. The personas helped me generate a better solution.

User Journey Map

I wanted to visualize the current website experience and illustrate potential pain points user may encounter when interacting with the site.

Ideate

Through the user journey and persona I got to explore different opportunities that would help the users.

This Sparked Some Questions

How might we simplify the booking process for users to have a more efficient and streamline experience with the site?
How might we implement relevant information that pertains to that particular service so users can decide on their own if they want to book with Speak With Joy?
How might we alter the interface for users to have more enjoyable and intuitive experience navigating the website?

Information Architecture

I made some improvement to the current website Information Architecture. I brainstormed different ways on how I could make the website simple, concise and viable.

Improvements:

Adding a services page makes it easier for users to get access to ALL the services and they are not hunting to figure out on their own.
Added a Testimonial and Shop page to concise the content where it is not overwhelming for the users. Gives users freedom to either read reviews or shop the product.
I removed the blog page from the navigation design and added it to the footer. This way it meets the business goals of pivoting into a more professional service website and it concise the content that makes it simple and easier for users to navigate.

Paper Wireframes

I started to sketch how each page could potential look like. I focused on the personas goals and what they needed in order to accomplish those goals. Thought about concise content to make it useful and relevant for users to navigate.

From Paper To Digital

I created Mid-fidelity wireframes to get a more accurate portrait of the website that showcase how things will work on the site.

Focused On 4 Main Screens:

Homepage that is concise but gave ENOUGH information. This allows users to organically learn about who Speak with Joy is and quickly highlighting the services they provide.
Life Coach and Speaking Page that has detailed information on what the services is, what to expect and highlights the prices. This allows transparency and it build trust among the users and the brand.
Contact Page keep an open communication with the user and the brand and it allows the brand to keep track on what services a user is contacting them about and how user found them.

High Fidelity Wireframes

Branding

I wanted to stay true to Speak With Joy core values. We updated her logo and updated the color to give a more professionally, minimalist and modern look.

Prototype & Testing

Most users were able to book a service with Speak With Joy but they found that label “BOOK NOW” was not connected to what they were actually doing. One Participants stated that…

Design Changes

The Final Solution

Home Page

Updated the comprehensive overview of Speak With Joy to encourage exploratory with engaging content.

Engaging Hero

I centered around a more welcoming and fun design to build that trust with the users. Users will have the chance to connect with Joy and see value on hearing from the source herself, this way it can start that relationship process between the Joy and the user. I showcased the CONTACT button for users who have already made that decision to book with her for easy access.

Life Coach and Speaking

Comprehensive overview of each services with prices to show transparency. Consistency with buttons across both pages.

Brand New Contact Page

View Website

Next Step

Next steps in this project would be to build a payment process of purchasing their book on their website. Base on research users liked the fact that they were able to schedule a Calendly appointment straight from the website. It was easy and quick without taking them to another tab on their device. My assumption is if a process is easy and quick it will motivate users to want to purchase the book straight from the actual site.

What I Learned

As the solo designer working with a real life client, there were so many things I learned through this project. These were some of the things I learned:

Design is not linear. I went into this project thinking that the design process will be linear which it was NOT. I found myself starting multiple stages, going back to pervious stages, refining what I just worked on and so on. But this makes sense because to understand the user, users needs, frustration and the business goals it is very complex. Things are always changing and I had to learn to adjust to what the outcomes were.
Communication is very IMPORTANT. Keeping an open line of communication to make sure my stakeholder and I were both on the same page. This meant I had to be very detailed on what I was doing, why this was important and how this was going to help with their business goals.
I learned the value of understanding the users frustration and the importance of their pain points. One advice my mentor told me as I was starting this project was to really hone in on the users, get deep into why they are feeling and/or thinking the way they do and understand their pain point. This helped me not only design a product that looked good but to design a product that was intuitive and minimize the users frustrations. I focused on the users pain point when making any design decision. Two questions I thought about were: Will this help my users and how? and How will this meet their goal?