Website Redesign: Rose Haven

Role: UX Researcher, UX Designer, Prototyping
Team: Collaboration with 4 team members
Timeline: 2 weeks

Redesign Goal

  1. Providing clients a sense of hope and security through accessing resources and services at greater ease.

  2. Providing our donors a quicker and more heartfelt user paths in hopes of inspiring our Donors and easing their process.

Summary

The Rose Haven Redesign was a project for my UX/UI course. Rose Haven is a day shelter serving women, children and non-binary people experiencing the trauma of abuse, homelessness and other disruptive life challenges. Their website is a major resource to inform shelter-seeking clients on the many services which Rose Haven offers. We aimed to help make that experience smoother and more informative for both clients and donors.

The Research

To begin the Rose Haven redesign, we needed to understand our users and their problems. We prepared interview questions and reached out to a Rose Haven Stakeholder requesting an interview. Our goals were to:

  1. Understand the most common needs for survivors

  2. Understand their challenge in accessing information

  3. Obtain general info about how they help their clients

We also conducted research through various media sources as well as completing a competitive analysis, both of which aided in our understanding of the mentality of the clients whom would potentially be interested in these services. One of the key features that the competitors had and Rose Haven lacked was the safely leave button.

Ideation

We then consolidated all of the research into an affinity diagram. This helped us recognize that most of our users are homeless due to domestic abuse and that many of them are in especial needs of escape due to COVID-19 stay-at-home orders.


Using that information, we created two User Personas to help us visualize the users and better target their needs: Sarah, the client and Lily, the donor.

  • Sarah the client’s need to escape to a place that can accommodate her children led us to work on making the information on services more accessible.

  • Lily the donor’s extreme interest in how her donations impact the community led us to re-evaluate the impact page and to add visual diagrams of how the donations fund the different client services.

persona1.png
persona2.png

We then evaluated the heuristics of the original website with user needs in mind.

Identified Problems:

  • Ambiguous services icons on homepage

  • Lacks updated information on how COVID-19 affects the offered services

  • Low accessibility due to color and font

  • Not enough emphasis on donations

  • Terminology needs updating

  • Lacks a “Safely Exit” button (extremely important for websites directed at victims of domestic abuse)

Old Website

Old Website

Rose Haven Iterations:

  • Added in-person services to the homepage

  • Added updated information regarding COVID-19 and how it affects the services offered

  • Updated services layout for increased visibility

  • Placed a donate button in the navigation bar for emphasis

  • Changed terminology such as “helping” to “our impact”

  • Introduced a new innovation we included was the “Safely Exit” button which would be available from any point on the website, to help maintain the safety of our users. Once the “Safely Exit” button is pressed, it would relocate the user to a recipe website on google, and make it impossible to return to the site by clicking the back button.

  • Elevated the color scheme of the site to better fit the target audience

New Website

New Website

 Below is a video of the client path prototype. Here you see the home page, the services page and an example of the in-depth service descriptions.

Below is a video of the donor path prototype. Here you see Rose Haven’s history, the community and leadership teams and the by the numbers page.

 Below is a video of the mobile prototype. Here you see the home page, the get involved page, the services page and an example of an in-depth service description.

 

Lesson for the Future:

  • Understanding your User is Key - Initially defined only the client, but quickly realized the donor’s significant role in the use of the website.

Key Performance Indicator (KPI) :

  • Clients spend 15% less time on the site because they find the information they need in a smoother and quicker manner

  • Donors spend 10% more time on the By The Numbers page

  • Online donations increase by 10%

  • 30% less calls and questions to staff, as all the information is easily found on the website

Next steps would be:

  • Collaborate with an overnight shelter to provide basic information on how to reach their services

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