Our team conducted user interviews with 5 Colorado residents to understand how users interacted with BCAA’s website and uncover potential navigation pain-points. Each interview consisted of a 45 minute virtual session where users were asked to navigate to specific pages on BCAA’s website and provide their initial reactions.

Through our interview process we gained these insights:

1. Users found the amount of text on pages to be overwhelming and not easily readable.
2. Multiple menu bars and information structure made navigation difficult and took multiple attempts to find content.
3. Pages lacked necessary information for users to understand their purpose or contained outdated content.

After conduting user interviews, our team researched BCAA competitors to understand their website features and content structure. We used this to create a competitive benchmark in order to identify gaps in BCAA’s current experience, establish best practices, and inform design decisions that would improve usability, visual hierarchy, and content clarity.

Throughout our research, we discovered that users struggled with the structure of BCAA’s website.

To improve site navigation, our team reorganized the site's content hierarchy and relationships and used this new structure to design a more intuitive navigation system.

This resulted in a singular top navigation bar with logically grouped pages and clear labels based on client feedback insights from our user interviews.

Building upon the streamlined navigation bar, we translated our research insights into high-fidelity screens that demonstrate our design recommendations based off of our client's desired Drupal 7 theme.

The screens below illustrate our key recommendations across BCAA's website:

• Navigation: Consolidated multiple menus into a single top navigation bar, making it easier for users to find information quickly.
• Content Hierarchy: Reorganized dense text and resources into digestable sections.
• Visual Clarity: Applied typography, spacing, and visual cues to improve readability and guide users through content without overwhelming them.

I feel fortunate for the opportunity to work with Boulder County Arts Alliance on this project. Our team began with an open-ended redesign request and implemented user research to identify usability, navigation, and content challenges on BCAA's website.

Our final deliverable was a website redesign proposal that addressed core usability challenges based on our user research.

Project Takeaways

• Early user research was critical in translating a broad redesign request into a focused priorities.
• Small content and formatting changes can make significant improvements towards usability without requiring a full visual overhaul.
• Leading the project reinforced the importance of aligning team workflows, user needs, and client expectations.