COA Front Desk Redesign
Design Research, UX and UI design
COA, Council on Aging of Southwestern Ohio, is a local non-profit agency devoted to helping older adults live independently. They have a vast and complex running system that makes information transfer harder for people that not know the organization. Their front desk ( a system containing phone calls, emails, referrals, websites, and other ways for people to contact them), especially their website, is in some way outdated. This made communication between the organizations, customers, professional users, and others more difficult, and also caused internal problems.
In this case, our design team figured out their problems by studying their system.
Working Process
Live Well Collaborative has a unique design process, which we followed for the project. We have three equal lengths of design phases: Research, Ideation, and Refinement to reach the final.
Research
During the first weeks of the design research period, the Live Well team interviewed 7 COA staff members, 3 older adults, and 1 caregiver. At the same time, the team also did secondary research: benchmarking and website audit. Based on the research process, we mapped out the organization system and got a better understanding of the organization’s requirements.
Ideation
During this period, the team interviewed more older adults about their online habits to fit the inclusive design for the website. To get more inclusive results, we also get help from COA staff to send out a survey from clients of different stakeholders. We visualized the survey data to show the organization their success and shortage. After gathering all feedback, the team started with the website's information architecture and began forming the website wireframe.
Front Desk System Map
We created this model for communicating with the team based on the research and the ADRC system map. From this map, we can see the complicated and time-consuming process prevents older adults from actively contact to the organization for help.
Refinement
Based on the wireframe and the prototype we made during the ideation process, the team interviewed 9 stakeholders. Based on the users’ feedback, we refined the homepage.
Please check the interactable website by clicking the below picture.
Final Result Poster
