Site Redesign, UI/UX Restructuring, and Web Author Training
2021 – Summer Music Festival (SMF) assistant director Ann Van Horn approached me to clean up the site before the application process opened up for the 2022 summer. Previously, this site had hardly any organizational structure and very ambiguous user experience paths. This project had a short turnaround time to get everything working in time for the application’s start date. We had to make quick, but thoughtful decisions on how we wanted to start work on the site. We worked on getting all the audition material put together and up on the website first, then continually made improvements to the rest of the site.
Since the assistant director and the administrative assistant are the web authors, I also needed to train them to be able to manage the site. This includes training sessions going over web best practices and content strategy to avoid creating the same mess again.
One of the biggest outcomes of this process is the main navigation menu: reduced from a dozen, wordy items to four clear, concise dropdown options. This led to a more clear user experience for anyone that lands on this page. The homepage now has clear directions for potential fellows and faculty, audience members, and donors/supporters.
Challenges
One of the primary struggles for the SMF site was the lack of any clear engagement strategy. This led to conflicting messages for new and returning users which made it difficult for people to engage with SMF in a meaningful way. We wanted to avoid users needing to default to contacting the administrative assistant directly for any and all questions. Additionally, we also had to address a huge backend disorganization issue. Lastly, there were simply too many text blocks and not enough engaging media on individual web pages.
Solutions
I addressed these issues with the SMF site by
- Going through an audience segmentation exercise with the SMF directors
- Determining specific actions we wanted users to take on the site
- Reworking written content, utilizing other design templates, and including more photos and videos to create visually engaging content
- Training the SMF web authors on web accessibility and web best practices
