Creating an Engaging
Community Hub for
Alumni Society
Website Redesign for the NYC Urban Fellows Alumni Association, 2021
Project Overview
The Urban Fellows Alumni Association (UFAA) is a not-for-profit organization consisted of former participants of New York City Urban Fellows (UF) program. Representing more than 1,000 alumni across its 52 years, the association is committed to foster an active network of prospective alumni as well as existing alumni.
Our goal was to improve the website that could serve as a community hub where the members could support each other socially and professionally.
Through a step-by-step approach including user research, competitive analysis, sitemap building and design iterations, we identified alumni directory, job listings and job posting as major user needs and created high-fidelity prototypes for each of them.
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Moderated user interviews, created empathy mapping and persona
Conducted competitive analysis
Arranged card sorting & tree testing and built a sitemap
Hand-drew sketches & created low-fidelity prototype and conducted user test
Designed high-fidelity prototype
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Research methods: Semi-structured user interview, empathy mapping, persona, competitive analysis, card sorting, tree testing, moderated user test
Tools: Slack, Miro, Zoom, Optimal Workshop, Figma
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Sacchit Vartak
Samika Rastogi
Stacey O’ Carroll
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Sep 10, 2021 - Dec 10, 2021
How do current UF alumni interact with the community?
User interview on Zoom (Interviewer: Jen Lee)
We conducted user interviews in order to hear voices of the real users, the UF alumni. Our main focus was to understand their current relationship with the community, how they connect with other alumni and what would be their major expectations for the website. Recruited 6 UF alumni interviewees and 2 interviewees with other alumni community experiences, we conducted semi-structured interview with total of 8 interviewees. After the interviews, we consolidated our interview data through empathy mapping and drew following key insights.
“I want to know how other alumni are doing. ”
Majority of the interviewees were curious about what other alumni are currently doing and where they are located. Also, even though the UF alumni had a desire to connect with diverse people from different year groups, they tend to only communicate within their cohorts.
“I’m little concerned about privacy issues.”
There were some desires for local alumni directory for UFAA website and opinions that it would motivate alumni to visit the website. However, some interviewees revealed their concerns about privacy issues and recommended a limited access to the directory provided only for the UF alumni.
“I want to help alumni to benefit from the program”
Since the Urban Fellows program has a long history, the UF alumni spans more than 50 years. Alumni in earlier years who have rich professional experiences tend to help recent alumni to benefit from the community by involving in a mentorship or donating to UFAA.
“It would be great if I could find job opportunities.”
Not only to network or to attend events, the interviewees also had a very specific need which was to seek job opportunities from the alumni community. UFAA was already sharing a few job postings through its own newsletter but most of the UF alumni were not aware about the postings.
“I live outside of New York”
As Urban Fellows program is based in New York City, most of the alumni events are also held inside New York. Therefore, alumni who moved out of New York after the program were not only able to attend events physically but also less likely to keep in touch with fellow alumni.
“I haven’t visited UFAA website.”
Most UF alumni rarely visited the website and even the former board member who participated in hosting the initial version of it. As they received recent updates of the community by emails or newsletters, there were not much incentive for visiting UFAA website.
Interview Protocol
Empathy Mapping
Persona:
A job seeker who lives out of New York
Based on the user interviews, we created a persona to communicate major insights
within our design team and to have a shared understandings of end users of the UF website.
Creating a sitemap optimized for UF alumni users
Navigation is a key for user experience in a website. Not only the website structure has to be intuitive and straight forward, it also has to encompass all the contents and features needed. Therefore, the key objective for building a sitemap was to align the structure with the user’s mental model. Based on the prior user research, we listed total of 22 content items for the website. Then we conducted card sorting to learn how the users grouped categories and labeled them. Afterwards, we conducted tree testing to verify our draft of sitemap which was built based on the card sorting results.
Tree Testing
Participants: 12
Tasks: 8
Optimal Workshop
Card Sorting
Participants: 9
Cards: 22
Tool: Optimal Workshop
Finalized sitemap of UF website
Competitive Analysis:
How are the other
alumni websites designed?
We conducted a competitive analysis on 12 other alumni websites
and drew design insights focusing on following 8 dimensions.
Homepage
Providing good understanding of the organization, showing succinct information
Search
Search and filter functions for quick and direct access to specific information
Navigation
Adequate number of menu items, drop down views, sitemap in the footer
Content
Creating a sense of community, motivating alumni to get involved in the association
Organization
Only relevant content items grouped together, contents following logical order
Appearance
Clear visual hierarchy and layout, CTA buttons with distinct color and position
Links & Labels
Links leading to relevant information, clear and informative labels
Image
Conveying contexts and stories, high resolution and aesthetically pleasing
Iterating Design Solutions:
Assisting users to meet other alumni and to discover or offer job opportunities
According to the user research, our team chose 2 sections from the proposed sitemap that are considered the most crucial design solutions needed for the UF alumni users.
Jobs Board
Users can access a list of job openings shared by UF alumni within the community which are often provided with referrals. Also, UF alumni who wants to share job posting could directly upload it to the site by filling out a form.
Meet Our Alumni
Users can discover other UF alumni who are in a specific location, industry or a year group using the alumni directory. Also, they could learn more about their personal stories, professional background or contact information on alumni profile pages.
Sketching Design Ideas
Through hand-drawn sketches, we quickly explored and conveyed navigation flows and design ideas for “Meet Our Alumni” and “Jobs Board” pages. Through iterations, we created a hand-drawn wireframes.
User Testing: Validating Hypotheses
Low-Fidelity Prototype
Using Figma, the hand-drawn wireframes were converted into responsive low-fidelity prototype.
Moderated User Test
In order to evaluate usability of the prototype, we conducted moderated remote user tests with 8 participants. We asked them to complete three following tasks:
Find a contact information of an alumni working in Environmentalism industry
Find a job opportunity in Los Angeles
Share a job opening information for other alumni
Low-Fidelity Prototype on Figma
Moderated User Test for Low-Fidelity Prototype
User Test Insights
Dropdown Menu
Users preferred direct access to each pages through dropdown menu from the navigation bar
Mobile-friendliness
Long scroll view of job posting was not appropriate in mobile situation
Referral Availability
Considering that referral availability is a great benefit, the users wanted it to be standout
Interactive Map
Users expected the map showing alumni locations to be interactive
Style Guide for UI Design
A style guide including logo, colors, typefaces and layout grids was created
for visual consistency and collaboration efficiency.
High Fidelity Prototype
“This is an amazing work!”
- Matt Waskiewicz, President of the Urban Fellows Alumni Association
Our clients, the board members of UFAA gave lots of positive feedbacks on the design and features shown through high-fidelity prototype of the website. Not only they empathized with the alumni users’ needs that we have identified, they especially were impressed by the Jobs Board. Considering that majority of government job openings are not posted on public online recruiting platforms, they acknowledged that providing alumni with an environment to freely share job postings and to networking would be greatly beneficial for them.