LA Tech4Good is a nonprofit organization at the intersection of social impact and technology. We amplify voices and data initiatives within the greater Los Angeles area to support and inspire equitable change.
One of the very first tasks we had on the agenda before stepping into anything research related was aligning on work expectations and teamwork. Very quickly, we ran into some resistance from our stakeholder on our first iteration of the roadmap.
The main issue was that the development of the new site rested on the belief that Angel and I would stick around until the end. As fairly new volunteers, we had not yet built up that level of trust.
We formed a middle-ground to develop bits and pieces of the site at a time. This way, we had shorter project timelines and the overall project could be picked up easily by another volunteer should life happen to us.
Right when I joined the team, Angel had already been finishing up a heuristic analysis of the site. She ran a couple interviews with people in the LA Tech4Good team and reviewed her research with me.
There were multiple heuristic violated, but the main ones that pointed us to revisit this site map were an inconsistent match between the system and real life, a lack of aesthetics and design that supported use of the site, and difficulty in discovering help and documentation.
The most important goal for any nonprofit site is to be clear about their mission. LA Tech4Good was a bit all over the place. So we decided to start our remodeling from the very foundation: the structure of the site.
To dive deeper into site visitors' mental models, I decided to run a card sort. I designed it as a hybrid to understand more of what people expected while keeping the test 100% remote and independent.
After we reached our respondent limit on our free plan, we got down and dirty with analysis. UX Tweak gives breakdowns of your responses, but since our tests were split up into two groups (perks of free plan), we had to create our own workarounds.
We both had very different ways of looking at data. My methods were qualitative in nature since that has been my main experience thus far and my insights were action based. Angel had a far more quantitative standpoint. (Not going to lie, I reached peak confusion more than once when she pulled out the math on spreadsheets). Our efforts came together to detail insights that formed our suggested changes to the site architecture.
The new site map is a live document in Figma, so changes may occur as we continue to test and iterate on the site.
