kweisuxdesign
Service & Website Redesign - Student Project Spring 2023
Sponsor: Alex Brown (Wider Circle UX Designer)
Primary Roles: Project Lead, UX Designer (leadership & project planning, research, UI design)
Wider Circle is a company that partners with insurance companies and works towards improving its members' health through creating a local social support network. This has shown to decrease loneliness in middle class adults aged 60+ as well as encourage those users to create and maintain meaningful relationships and become more involved in their community.
Mission
Through exploration of the current website features and user research, we decided to redesign the website and event experience in order to make the service easier to use and more engaging. In doing this, we hope to motivate both members and Wider Circle staff to enjoy taking part in the events, provide necessary details about hosted events, and inspire members to create events of their own.
Our final design aims to increase agency for users to find events that interest them and allow them to make deeper connections with others.
Final Design
Event Overview User Interface
Through my team's own exploration of Wider Circle's site and discussions with our project sponsor, Alex Brown, we found that the social events being put on by the service were only either directly sent to its members by facilitators that lead the events or included on a printed calendar that did not allow for changes. This put a lot of responsibility on each facilitator, caused inefficient communication, and sometimes provided inaccurate information (in the case of the physical calendar).
Feedback from our user testing and research helped guide our design process by identifying desired features and information about the events. This included:
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clearly marked & differentiated events
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events tailored to user's interests & every event in the area
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information including event location, time, and attendees
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clarification of involvement of money, food, and/or free items at events
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An implemented "tag" system of key words related to events
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a search bar and option to change font size
Event Filters Sidebar
Because of basic understanding from the users we interviewed about search filters and recognizing that we did not want to overwhelm people with information on event pages, we included an advanced search filter.
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Interviews and initial testing revealed members of our user group frequently chose events based around six motivational categories mentioned by our sponsor. Because of this, we included five of the given categories in the search filter as well as making the sixth category, taking part for items provided at events, a category of its own.
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Information including event frequency and location relative to an address are both details that users found important. Since these things were included in feedback about user search habits specifically, we included them in the search filter.
Individual Event Details
Our final wireframe includes the full event page after being clicked on. It includes the general information found on the condensed version of the event as well as:
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facilitator information (including a way to contact them)
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a more detailed description of the event
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key word "tags", including level of intensity and dress requirements
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a way to invite others to an event
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an RSVP button to indicate that a member is going, which also adds the event to a personalized calendar
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a discussion chat for members to share questions or commentary
The information and features added to this page were included based on how specific they are to each event and information that was found to be relevant only after already clicking on the event (such as dress code).
Recommendations for Wider Circle Moving Forward
Research and user feedback-based suggestions organized into actionable steps
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Instead of a formal 4-6 week onboarding for new users, encourage event attendance as a form of hands-on onboarding. This adjustment would save time for everyone involved and reduce member drop outs.
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The personalized event selection webpage is the first step towards enabling and empowering individuals to create their own events. Once members are comfortable posting and hosting their own events, facilitator burnout will be reduced (the current ratio is 1 hired facilitator to 500 members).
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Design a digital onboarding walkthrough of the event page after an individual signs up with Wider Circle to increase member comfort and familiarity with the website.
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Clarify the activity intensity for users on active events to reduce hesitancy from event attendees and encourage them to try new things by offering a low intensity event.