Council on Aging (COA) is Southwest Ohio’s leading resource for providing services for staying independent at home, as well as providing support programs for Caregivers. The challenge is customer and provider information is in multiple formats and accessed in numerous ways. Currently COA’s website is acting as the “primary” front door for five different stakeholders (older adults, caregivers, COA staff, service providers, and professionals).For this website redesign project, I worked as a project lead to design, test, and strategize the user experience.

The entire team worked together to work on rapid iterations for each page type we needed to accomplish. One technique we used was called “Crazy 8s,” in which we each drew 8 ideas in 8 minutes.We then translated our favorite ideas into digital wireframes for our first prototype.

We created a guide for testing by outlining what we wanted to learn about each feature we were showing users, then formulated them into a natural sequence of tasks. We observed users’ comments, actions, and reactions, as well as asking them questions about their internet usage and familiarity with COA.After our first round of user testing, we made refinements in response to users’ feedback, and tested a new prototype using the same process.

By sorting through all the insights we collected from testing, we were able to start clustering insights into categories that came up frequently. We identified actionable takeaways from each of those, and found the overarching themes among them to include: clarity, hierarchy, proactivity, and consistency.