Conclusions & Future Development
On the fifth day into this process, I had major surgery, and had to continue working
Challenges Encountered
Working for Freelance clients poses its own challenges, but with good time management and consistent communication, it is wonderful adventure.
I am so happy to help my stakeholder in her mission to help Veterans live fully.
Future Development
The Problem
Veterans often find it difficult to find help after they have left the military, and they find it even harder to find legitimate resources that have been validated.
Veteran Help Point connects veterans with businesses and non-profits in their area which provide benefits and services to military veterans and their families.
It had grown from a handful of resources to a database of more than 300 entries with no search or filter capabilities. Veterans and their families felt overwhelmed and gave up before connecting to a resource.
The Solution
This website aimed to improve user experience by focusing on providing a maps-based interface that would be easily navigable and filterable for an individual who may or may not be highly computer literate.
The redesign took into consideration qualitative user interviews, as well as quantitative user testing of the original site
The Impact
Relevant resource discovery was reduced from 12 minutes to 48 seconds.
Home page load reduced from 7.4 seconds to 2.7 seconds.
Project Context
Results of my research
Creative insights:
I found that while patriotic themes are common, muted tones were better received due to the emotional nature of users searching for resources, especially in a crisis.
My research concluded that veterans
are looking for local help more than national
desire resources that have been vetted by another veteran or their families
need directions or maps because many services are in person.
may not be willing to scroll through hundreds of listings, even if they were sorted
I reviewed my findings with the stakeholder to confirm my results.
Planning
Ideation Phase
Feature Prioritization and Stakeholder meeting (2 hours):
Based on my findings in the discovery and definition phases of my deisign sprint, I created a prioritization matrix focused on communicating what was feasible and impactful.
Results
I shared this with the stakeholder and explained why a highly desired feature (Location based sorting) was not feasible in the time or budget alloted for this project. I suggested that future development in this area would be a great idea, but it could not be accomplished within the scope of our project. Instead, I suggested that we focus on presenting the data in a clean, easy to read format, and that we utilize Google Maps for our map interface.
Wireframing (3 days)
After looking through about 20 different websites with the stakeholder, I wireframed out the site in both desktop and mobile and sent it to her for approval before beginning to implement designs in Wix.
