The Minnesota State Horticulture Society has been apart of the gardening community for 154 years. By providing different resources such as programs, blogs, webinars, and the Northern Gardener Magazine.
Problem
The Minnesota State Horticulture Society recently launched their new resource hub and needed help to redesign and organize the content within the resource hub.
Primary Users
Collectively the team identified the primary users were gardeners who are looking for expert resources that are reputable about regional-specific gardening information.
Goal
The Minnesota State Horticulture Society wanted to increase the engagement with the content that is provided, and also to drive membership with racial and socioeconomically diverse user groups. Also to improve the navigability, structure, identity, and clarity of the website.
Secondary Users
New gardeners who are looking for accessible information, content, and engagement opportunities within the gardening community. Partner organizations to reach out and market the products and services to a larger horticulture audience.
Tools
Sketch
Figma
Miro
InVision
Google docs
Pages
Zoom
Summary
Collaborated with deep-dive analysis research.
Consolidated findings with the team.
Created potential redesign using Figma.
Start to finish involvement throughout
Assisted with the implementation plan for the client.
My Role
The team was able to work together and separate to work on different parts of this project. I was able to conduct a competitive analysis, moderate a user interview as well as take notes for another. Consolidate notes with the team. From there, I was able to work on the design for the implementation plan, which inspired my teammate. I also assisted with the presentation deck as well as the script for when we presented our project.
Work Dynamic
As a group, we looked over the website and talked about what problems stood out to us. One that stood out was that there was a lot of information. We needed to find out what was in the space already. In addition to that, we needed to find out how other websites organized information. I conducted a competitive analysis and a teammate conducted a comparative analysis
The client came to the team with a long list of requests that they wanted us to help them with. The team was eager to get started on helping the client. Would we be able to find solutions to all of the client’s requests? Would we be able to find the right solutions that would help the client and their users/future users? Read more to find out!
Group InVision Board- competitive and comparative analysis
InVision Board for the team.
Competitive and comparative Analysis
Once we shared all of the results of both of the analyses, we discussed conducting scenario-led based testing with a card sort activity. The client sourced some of the participants, and we also added other participants that were also involved in the gardening space.
Conducting User testing using zoom.
Key take aways:
While the team was testing the current state of the website, we noticed that most users would use the search bar straight away. We learned that there was a disconnect from the information listed, to the information that pulls when keywords or phrases are searched. The team spoke with some developers and they said that the reason that the information is not being pulled was due to no words or phrases “housing” the content. That is why the system could not find certain information when searched even though the website provided it.
The entire team added their notes from the user interviews to a Miro board.
Consolidating the Findings from all the user testing using Miro.
The team put the findings from the card sort from the testing up on the same Miro board as well.
Once we had all of our notes together, we looked over the information that we gathered and started getting ideas on the prototype. We all started sketching and ideating our thoughts on what direction the prototype should go. I started in Sketch but later changed to Figma. Each member of the group built out a low-Fidelity prototype. We then voted on one design and proceeded to build it out.Ideating
While testing was being done on the prototype, I went ahead to start working on the implementation plan design template.
Implementation Plan - Made using Sketch
From my design, I inspired a teammate to make another design that the group decided to go ahead with.
Manola Suvannarad -implementation plan
While the team split and started working in different directions. One teammate focused on putting the information Architecture diagram together.
Siri Jorstad -Information Architecture
A style guide was created to give an aid to how to apply the new design features correctly.
Style Guide for the new features.
Another teammate continued working on the prototype that the team voted on moving forward with the design. As soon as the prototype was ready for testing the team sourced participants that would be the future user base that the client is trying to expand too. We learned that the prototype worked well with potential users. The teammate that was working on the prototype continued to bring the prototype to a high-fidelity.
D’Lee Dreyer - High Fidelity Prototype
Conclusion
In conclusion, we worked together to address the goals of the client and the users. From there we were able to find out specific pain points that we were able to address in the redesign. We came up with an implementation plan to help the client achieve our recommendations and understand the results of the implementation when applied correctly.
Follow-up Update:
After the client received the hand-off package I wanted to check in to see how our implementation plan was working for the client. I was told that everything was working well for the client and they had an extra question on how to get the sections to collapse. I was apple to help them with suggesting an accordion for WordPress. If they needed anything else they are open to reaching out to me and I will try my best to help.