Client: Chayn helps women experiencing abuse find the right information they need to take control of their lives. Soul Medicine is a multilingual digital service designed to deliver critical information in bite-sized pieces.
Brief: Soul Medicine came to us to help redesign the sign-up process to offer a simple, quick, and streamlined way for users to choose, receive, and access the course content.
My role: The research and analysis was a join effort. I led the design studio and took that information and our initial sketches to design the paper prototype. I also designed some of the hi-fi screens, and the mobile screens for our new website.
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“They came up with excellent ideas — half of which we can implement right away! Really understood the brief and respected user needs. Well done.” — Hera (Chayn Founder)
We met with Dina, the project manager of Soul Medicine to understand the most important parts of the company and learn what pain points they have identified in their users.
Chayn and soul medicine provided us with the audio of 6 user interviews. We wrote down all of the points from these on post it notes and created an affinity map by grouping them together into common categories. As the users are a very specific and vulnerable population, it would have been hard to find people to conduct our own interviews in the time frame given and therefore this was invaluable research that helped us to understand our users and their pain points.
In addition to an affinity map of the interviews, we also created an affinity map of 2 reports ‘Tech vs Abuse’ that were conducted in 2017 and 2019, funded by Comic Relief.
From the affinity mapping, we identified the main pain points that appeared both in the interviews and reports were isolation, lack of community and information, desire for in person classes and support, and it being hard to find the right information.
Sara, our primary persona, is living with her abuser and would like to leave but needs information to do so. This can only be found in short bursts when she has time because her husband tracks her email and works from home. She comes to Soul Medicine for help.
We tested 9 users to to understand the current challenges of the website and identify pain points. We asked users to find a certain piece of information and then to create an account and subscribe to that content.
Pain point: Users did not know how to create an account and did not know what they were signing up for.
To begin our ideation phase, I conducted a design studio with our team, Dina (Soul Medicine project manager), Hera (Chayn founder) and 2 volunteers from the organisation. This was a great way to generate new designs and ideas about the project.
After the usability testing of the beta website we noticed there were some issues with the copy on the website. To ensure that we were using language that would be understood we conducted an open card sort with 8 women who are survivors of abuse. We provided them with a list of all the future courses that are going to be on the website and asked them to categorise them into topics. We then conducted a closed card sort to test these topics.
After we had the user flow in place we all began to sketch out our ideas of how we were envisioning the wireframes. My role was to then take all of the sketches and ideas from the design studio and to turn them into one cohesive paper prototype that had all of the different ideas in a clear and intuitive way.
During this iterative process we continually tested the low-fidelity, mid-fidelity, and high fidelity prototypes before moving into a higher fidelity.
In addition, we conducted accessibility tests on the current colour contrasts being used to see if the information was digitally accessible. Some of the colour contrasts were not, and therefore we adjusted the font and size to make sure they were accessible.
My role, in addition to creating some of the hi-fi pages, was to design the mobile screens for our design. For these, I simplified the design into one column and made sure the information was stacked in the correct hierarchy and that the font sizes were appropriate for a phone.
The walk through of our final protoype can be seen below:
"It comes across very intuitive, very empathetic, I feel it really understands the target audience", User during testing
Chayn and Soul Medicine were inspiring companies to work with. The biggest challenge that I found during this project was that the intended users were a very specific and vulnerable group and therefore identifying people to do usability tests and interviews with was a challenge.
“I really enjoyed going through your slides, and the research and ideas you all came up with — so many good ideas and hypotheses to think through! Also, it’s super impressive how much you covered in the 2.5 weeks!” — Jits, Developer
“The presentation was great as were the solutions. You have helped us a lot.” — Dina, Project Manager
In addition to the on-the-spot feedback, Soul Medicine came back to us and told us that many of the changes we had made would be implemented into their website and invited us to their launch party. It was an amazing experience and one that I will never forget.
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