Conclusions & Future Development
My primary constraints were budgetary and time. I had to work with almost no funding. My largest budget was $358.00. Often information was given to me the day of a major scheduled launch which necessitated immediate redesign.
I also learned to navigate the politics of a complex non-profit with ever changing personalities. The board changed every year, just before our final deadline, which meant communication had to be proactive and clear. While I am now close friends with some of the people I worked with, this has been a learning experience for me. They will all tell you that I grew a lot and learned to take direction and criticism better. They would also tell you that they would work with me again.
I learned that volunteer boards are unique, and that every change in power also changes creative direction. I learned to continue speaking and advocating for the user. My job was to bring the stakeholders alongside.
Probably the biggest hurdle for this project came in 2015. I had been warning the organization that the site was at risk for almost a year, but they refused to listen. One morning in April, I woke up to a panicked call from the executive director that the site was just... gone. The domain had been sold, and no one knew how to get access to the back end of the site in order to redirect it to a new domain. Luckily, I was prepared and had a temporary landing page up within 3 hours and a new site launched within 3 days. I rebuilt the membership database from a series of spreadsheets that no one had validated data on, and moved the organization forward.
Challenges Encountered
This project was a passion project for me. I truly believe in the mission and work of this organization, and it was my honor to serve them as their web developer and app designer for as long as I could. If money and time were no object I would serve them again in a heartbeat.
However, if I could go back and change one thing, I would have worked to develop a cohesive design system that could be transferred from one board and conference year to the next. It would have made the process a lot more streamlined and improved members' experience. I did not advocate for it enough.
Future Development
The Problem
In 2013, I went to register my husband for the 2014 annual conference, but after 45 minutes of reading, I still couldn't find the information I needed. The website was so poorly designed and maintained that organization members still talk about it today, 10 years later.
The Solution
After pleading with the board of directors, I finally got access to the site in 2014. Initially, my task was just to do a content audit of the site and correct the more than 1,600 broken links and orphan pages (not accessible through any menu or link) that had accumulated, but after proving my work with the 2015 and 2016 conferences, a complete redesign of the site was approved.
The Impact
-Monthly site views increased from 17 to 2,150 between 2012 and 2017
-Time on page increased from 40 seconds to more than 21 minutes.
-Ranking improved on 1st iteration from page 3 to page 1 for primary keywords
-Newsletter subscriptions increased from 96 to 217 (97% of active membership)
Project Context
Proving the Problem to the Stakeholder
Non-Profits are fun and rewarding... Board of Directors can be a challenge.
At first, I WAS the user. I found a problem, and that's what led to my work on this project.
Imagine this: It's 2014. You pull up a web page to register for a professional neuroscience conference that is occuring in 6 months, only to see this:
Now, you don't need to join the organization... you're already a member. (In fact, at the time, I was LOGGED IN AS A MEMBER!) Instead, you need to:
View the agenda to decide whether to attend
Register for the conference
Book the hotel
Move on with your very busy day as a mental health professional
Now I understand, they wanted to put something out there... but this wall of text did not help me accomplish my tasks at all.
I got so frustrated with searching for a way to register that I ended up copying the content to a word document and removing all unnecessary information in order to narrow down what I needed. I ended up having to google search the hotel in order to register, and I never could find the link to register, so I had to send them an e-mail. Complete. Usability. FAIL.
I decided that I needed to demonstrate how a conference site should be structured, so I mocked it up for them, contacted the chair of the ISNR Website Committee, and begged to be allowed to fix it.
Initially, my offer to help was completely shot down, not because the problem wasn't real or because they didn't like my designs, but because I don't have an advanced degree in mental health or neuroscience. You've got to love academics.
I refused to give up. I believed in the work that ISNR does, so I pushed the issue.
I decided to show them that it could be better, which meant doing the work and presenting it to them.
Planning
I planned, iterated, designed, and re-designed
Throughout the process, ISNR kept putting out more and more information as it became available, and most of it was in .pdf format. So I used it.
As soon as the agenda became available, I did 3 versions of the agenda page:
Just embedding the .pdf
Re-creating the list in a table format, like they had it. (I still think they built it in Excel).
Creating a page for each topic, including the speaker, topic "track," any additional fees with a link to pay, and the details.
When speaker information came out, I added a speaker page, conducted user testing, and iterated.
By the time the conference started, I had a design I could share. I followed the Conference Committee chair and the Website Committee chair around for 3 days, met with the whole board, and convinced them to let me implement my designs for 2015.
Execution
These were the results. Year after Year.
Every Board of Directors had their own mission and vision for the conference sites. Some I agreed with, some I did not, but every year, we saw positive responses from the membership, and areas for growth, when asked for feedback.
2015: Board vision: Tech forward, punchy, and dark
2016: Board vision: A beachy resort vacation with a side of education... But make it professional
2017: Board vision: Simple. Minimalist... and no unneccesary graphics. Make it academic.
2018: Board Vision: Ok not as minimal as last year. Your way is better... Can we have bolder colors that bring the Arizona desert to mind?
2019: My last year!
I left ISNR after 2019 because I decided to focus on my professional projects, and could not justify the time on this volunteer project. I turned over the project to a new committee chair after the 2019 conference.
