BYU-Idaho Wellness Center Redesign
This project was a complete redesign of Brigham Young University-Idaho’s Wellness Center website. The Wellness Center provides useful resources covering the main dimensions of wellness to support the overall wellness of the students of BYU-Idaho.
My Role
I was the sole User Experience (UX) Designer and Lead UX Researcher on this project. I organized the user research and lead two team members through the user interview process.
Project Goals
The goal of this project was to get the website to increase awareness of the services the Wellness Center offers to students and to make their services easier to find on their website. The goal is also to reshape the idea that the Wellness Center not only covers physical wellness but all of the dimensions of wellness.
Problem
The current Wellness Center website makes it difficult to navigate and find the wellness services available. As a result, the students of BYU-Idaho were not aware of the services the Wellness Center offers.
Solution
By categorizing the information and services into sections of wellness, it is now easier to navigate the Wellness Center website and understand the services they offer.
User Research
Assumptions
- Users find the current website confusing to navigate.
- Users can’t easily find all the services offered by the Wellness Center.
- Most users navigate away from the Wellness Center quickly.
- Users assume the Wellness Center’s main focus is physical wellness.
Key Findings
Our team conducted 30+ user interviews to understand how the users are currently interacting with the Wellness Center and to see whether our assumptions were correct.
- The majority of tested users thought that the current website was not very helpful/informative.
- Many users were not able to find what they were asked to navigate to.
- The idea of sorting information into wellness categories was appreciated by all users tested.
- When asked what services they would expect the Wellness Center to have, the majority of answers were about physical wellness.
User Personas
I created 3 user personas to help me focus on the main target audience and user groups of the BYU-Idaho Wellness Center.
Card Sorting
Trying to successfully organize the information and services was the key to success on this website, so I decided to conduct a card sorting exercise to see how the users would categorize the sections/services on the website.
I took the results from 10 user card sorts and listed out the most common responses in a site tree (view below).
Competitor Research
It was important to research what other schools are doing and how they are categorizing their wellness information/services. In my research, I noticed many universities struggle with categorizing their wellness resources, but these few stood out to me as top competitors:
University of Wyoming Wellness Center
The UW Wellness Center does a great job of making their services easily accessible. They also successfully make it clear that they cover all types of wellness.
Brigham Young University Student Wellness
BYU Student Wellness successfully promotes resources for the main dimensions of wellness and is easily navigational.
Ohio Dominican University Wellness Center
Even if they do not have many services, the ODU Wellness Center makes it very clear what services they offer and make it easy to navigate.
Design Process
Sketching
After our team conducted all of the needed user and website research needed, I moved on to the design process. To begin, I sketched out many variations of each page needed on the website, focusing on the research that had been conducted.
Wireframes
Once I got all my ideas out into sketches, I began creating wireframes based on the strongest ideas from these sketches. These wireframes were then user tested on 20 individuals from this website's userbase.
Testing Takeaways:
- Users liked the categorization of services & information into wellness dimensions.
- Users were interested in seeing social & financial wellness having a larger focus instead of being placed under ‘General Wellness’.
- A majority of users thought it would be convenient to have the fitness classes schedule listed on the ‘Physical Wellness’ page.
Lo-Fi Mockups
After testing the wireframes, it was time to start adding details and choosing which design components would work best from the layout of the wireframes, while also incorporating changes based on the user research from the wireframes. These lo-fi mockups were then tested again on 20 individuals from this website’s userbase.
Testing Takeaways:
- Some users thought that the counseling crisis help numbers should be listed on the ‘Mental Wellness’ page for easy accessibility.
- Users agreed that the ‘Book a Consultation’ component should be on each of the main pages, not just the home page.
- Users thought that the Wellness Center hours needed to be made more clear on the website.
Hi-Fi Mockups
After testing the lo-fi mockups, I was able to continue improving the website design by incorporating the feedback I received during the previous round of user testing.
The next big step for these hi-fi mockups was officially adding the color, typography, images, and design components. Then these hi-fi mockups were used to conduct the final round of user interviews.
Final Testing Takeaways:
- Since there is only relationship information & services on the ‘Social Wellness’ page, it should be renamed to ‘Relationship Wellness’.
- Users thought that the images used supported the feeling of wellness throughout the website.
- Users found this design easy to navigate and understand.
Final Design
The final step for this project was for me to complete the redesign. I made final changes by incorporating the feedback from the hi-fi mockup user tests, and by adding any needed design fixes.
The final design can be viewed here.
In the end, through user testing, feedback from my team, and applying my research findings to my designs, I was able to successfully redesign the BYU-Idaho Wellness Center website from confusing to navigate and understand the services offered, to easy to navigate and quick to find and understand all services offered.
Lessons Learned: The main lesson that I learned from this project was how to better work with pre-designed components to build a website design, rather than building everything from scratch. This pushed my design skills as I learned how to creatively work within the constraints of a style guide.
What I would have done differently: If I were to do this project over again, I would have spent more time at the beginning of the design process to study the style guide and pre-designed components that I would be working with.
