COA Website Redesign

Project Goals

At the start of this process, we picked up on what the team from the previous semester had identified though their research. They discovered the best way to improve navigation was to redesign the COA website. Throughout the Spring 2023 semester, we continuously researched, designed, and tested before handing off the final redesigned website package to COA.

Current Website

COA came to Livewell initially with the intention of improving information location to reduce phone calls to their call center. Over the project in the previous semester, it was identified that users were calling because of the difficulty finding information on their website. Livewell and COA then moved forward to develop a new site for users for my team’s project. Current COA website can be found at www.help4seniors.org.

Research & Design Methods

28 interviews, spanning across older adults, caregivers, COA staff, and COA service providers were conducted. This testing was done over the course of the 15-week project so the team could continue to refine and update prototypes with consistent user input.

Accessibility

Accessibility is important for all websites, but with COA’s site it proved to be even more crucial to get right as many older adults without digital literacy would be frequenting the website. In depth research on accessibility guidelines and standard procedures was completed to ensure the target audience would be fully supported.

Themes

To refine our approach to the website, we spent a lot of time analyzing our results from out interviews. Four key insights stood out to us as the most important ideas to focus on: Clarity, proactivity, consistency, and hierarchy.

Ideation

Ideation started first with quick and rapid ideations on paper for each page. Once those were completed, each team member focused on designing drafts of assigned pages before passing those to others on the team to critique and further ideate upon. Text, colors, content, and other aspects were then integrated as pages were finalized.

Refinement

Once pages were near complete, pages were compared to the style guide to ensure consistency. Responsive designs were created so the website would be accessible in any aspect ratio.

Livewell created a hand-off guide for COA to give to developers. This handoff included pixel perfect and responsive mobile and web prototypes for each of the 52 pages, a design library, a style guide, a developer guide, and success measurement guide.

Current site progress

The redesign was passed off to COA at the end of Spring 2023 and is currently in development.

Personal Learnings

This was my first opportunity to redesign a website professionally. Being that it was a small team, I got to have substantial input on this project and had many pages that were my responsibility. One major highlight of this experience was how much time we spent on accessibility, as this website’s target audience was those of older generations who are most likely to not be digitally fluent or may have disabilities that makes websites more difficult to navigate. Learning how to make responsive designs in Figma was also a big challenge, but I found it to be very rewarding and enjoyable. It was an incredible experience to work on a project that will help so many people, and made me thrilled to continue my career in design.