Sankofa

Information Architecture Redesign

Sankofa Healing Studio serves incarcerated women of color, a community that often faces significant barriers to digital literacy. To meet our users where they are, we are redesigning our platform to be exceptionally user-friendly, ensuring that even those with very limited tech experience can navigate our resources with ease.

✦ Problem

How might we make website easier to navigate for therapy patients so that they can book an appointment faster?

✦ Solution

Placing the obvious front and center.

Redesigned complete website user flow by restructuring information architecture to improve navigation clarity, content hierarchy, and overall user experience usability.

Role - Solo UXD, academic project
Team - 3 other UXD designers
Duration - 4 Months
Tools - Figma, Miro, Slack

160% efficiency in booking an appointment from usability testing results

✦ Solution

Placing the obvious front and centre

The old home screen felt like a landing page with irrelevant data, adding cognitive load due to confusing navigation and hierarchy. The new design eliminates this issue.

✦ Project Roadmap

We started with content audit to understand lay of the land. This was followed by usability testing of the existing website and several design solutions and iteration to address the core issue.

✦ Findability Study

Findability Test - Are you able to book an appointment?
Two pro UX designers tackled a single goal: book an appointment. Confusing terminology and maze-like navigation hindered users, requiring a clearer approach.

Task completion = 100%, Task success = 0%

2/2 users were able to complete the task but both of them failed to reach the desired location

✦ Primary Research

Why did the users fail?

Four patients and two therapists were interviewed to ensure unbiased data collection.

Patients says - "Where the button to book appoinmtment? It is too confusing for me."

Other therapist says - "It's difficult to differentiate between what is for patients and what is meant for other therapists"

✦ Contextual inquiry

Such a bad website for such a beautiful studio! The ambience of website and the actual studio was worlds' apart.

The studio was calm, but the website was a chaos.

While studio refelcted a mindul approach to colors, textures and sensory experience, the website was the exact opposite of what the studio stood for.

✦ The 5 Why method

From the surface to the root cause of why was the user unable to book an appointment?

✦ Storyboard persona

Why because you will understand Soulful Sarah Better if you look at her story. Stories will help UXD's emphatize better with personas.

✦ Content Audit

We audited the existing information architecture and make a complex excel sheet to understand how users make way finding decisions.

✦ User Journey Map

Soulful Sarah goes through a lot of emotions, decisions, ups and downs, all while simply trying to book an appointment.

✦ Competitive Analysis

How does 10 competitor manage appointment booking?

Simple Terminologies

So simple, even a 12 y/o can navigate

Calm colors

Pastal colors, and simple typography

Metrics

Homapage had statistics to attract on-boarding users

✦ Current Information Architecture

✦ Proposed Information Architecture

✦ Ideation for new features

Card Sorting, brain storming and dot voting

✦ Early Sketches

Hand-drawn paper prototype : Test, change and test again

✦ Digital Wireframes

✦ Style Guide

A simple design standard all across all screens

✦ High-fidelity wireframes

✦ Usability testing

10 students participated in the moderated usability testing

Book appointment

Goal 01

Select a therapist for a set time and date

Goal 02

90% success

and 80% NPS Score

✦ Learnings

Takeaways

Be respectful of each other’s personal space. Ensure users feel safe to discuss their pain points.

Nonprofits rely heavily on grants, so be ready to adapt your project to meet their specific needs.

Next steps

Incorporate insurance checking as soon as possible. It will be the next milestone in the product development lifecycle.

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