Stakeholder Interview

In order to understand the opportunity space better, my team and I met with the stakeholder. Our goals going into the interview were to find answers to the following questions:

• What is our project area(s) of focus?

• What are the client’s short-term engagement goals?

• What are long-term organizational goals?

From the interview, my team and I learned:

• The client is interested in shifting to a community engagement platform to create pathways to get more published black authors which include shifting from Strive Publishing to Strive Community Publishing.

• The client is also interested in fostering that community engagement platform through storytelling to uplift stories from within the Black community. This platform should communicate inclusivity and participation among the black community.

• Additionally, there was a theme of wanting to develop a platform to help authors submit their manuscripts.

• Long-term, the client is interested in owning her own building for Strive Publishing within the local community.

Competitive Analysis

My team and I conducted a competitive analysis of the competitive market to see how they’re communicating with their users and how they were using tone and language to express their mission and value. We also focused on their use of call-to-action buttons to get an idea of how we were going to create meaningful call-to-action buttons in our redesign.

We learned that color and language play a crucial role in conveying the tone of an organization to users. There is a varying spectrum of tone from the competitive landscape from dark and serious to bright and playful. This really had us thinking about how we wanted to convey Strive’s shift and what would best resonate with users which would later be addressed in our prototypes.

Content Inventory

In addition to the competitive analysis which was done as a group, the team and I at this point broke off in two groups where two group members focused on the content inventory and the information architecture of the website while the other two focused on the user interviews. Another team member and I worked on the content inventory to gain a better understanding of the current website and started drafting out preliminary information architectures.

Current Website IA

Proposed Website IAs

Towards the end of the project and after iterative tests of the diagram and communication with the group, I was tasked to create a high-fidelity IA of the website.

Survey & User Interviews

For our research, we were able to meet with 8 participants and sent out a survey where we were able to collect data from 60 participants.

Survey

Key Insights

Within Black community: 

• Interest in sharing stories via a variety of formats (print and digital)

• Access to resources and vulnerability are the biggest barriers to sharing stories

• Training and guidance and a supportive community would help members share stories

Within ally community: 

• Community members learn about stories via news outlets, social media, and word of mouth

• The desire to uplift Black stories by reading/buying stories authored by Black authors via Black-owned bookstores and sharing with family/friends

User Interviews

Key Insights

• Feelings of fear and vulnerability of how stories will be received

• Lack of resources for publishing stories

• Lack of guidance for sharing manuscripts to be published

Prototyping

There was a big pattern we noticed surrounding vulnerability/fear and a lack of resources and guidance for people to share stories. We decided to focus heavily on the home page redesign to communicate inclusivity and to provide reassurance for visitors.

Initial Home Page Designs

Initial home page designs were done in collaboration with myself and another designer. Below you can find iterations of our designs.

Concept Evaluations

Key Insights

• Double header navigation is confusing

• Participants suggested adding a map of Africa to communicate the inclusivity of the African diaspora

• Most participants said shapes of African textiles communicate inclusivity of African diaspora

• Participants mentioned the need to include more call-to-actions on the home page that will prompt them to take action

• Images on homepage

  • No more than 3 images

  • Should be representative of various ages and genders

Results from our first round of evaluations indicated that most participants preferred a black over a white background. This design, however, rendered the two black figures and company name on the original Strive logo invisible and thus necessitated a change to the logo colors. We explored various alternatives, including making the figures white against a black background. However, we were concerned with the implications of making the figures of the Strive logo white, we conducted another round of evaluation sessions.

Key Insights

• Center alignment of the logo is preferred

• Zero participants liked the box-in logo

• 7/8 participants said the brown logo is not very visible against a black background and would therefore not be a good color for the logo

• 7/8 participants preferred black background for homepage and website

More Prototyping!

While my teammates focused on the second round of concept evaluations with the logo, another team member and I worked on more prototyping. As a team, we wanted to be able to address user concerns with the lack of guidance and resources for publishing. We decided to focus heavily on the Publish a Book flow to address those concerns. We also wanted to be able to address the desire for community members to support Strive and created a store flow with the addition of merchandise. I focused on the store flow.

Store In Progress Wireframes

Multi-Touchpoint Strategy Map

We created a strategy map to visualize the various touchpoints for Strive to begin thinking about how to meaningfully engage with the community. In order to meet the need of community members as voiced in our research, we decided to expand Strive’s store and include merchandise to increase the ways in which community members can support Strive. We also added the addition of Community Storytelling where Strive collects and curates stories from within the community. This gives the community the ability to share their stories in a digital form that gets turned into a physical product. After deliberation with the group, I moved forward with creating the final version of the strategy map.

Interactive Prototype

Finalized store flow for the interactive prototype.

Implementation Plan

We created an implementation plan to give the client an idea of what steps need to be taken to bring our recommendations to life. A copy of the plan can be found below.