ICC Website & CMS Redesign

a photograph of banners from an ICC house in 1984.

When I began working for the ICC as The User Experience and Website Coordinator, I had three years of experience with the organization from living in one of their cooperative houses and being a board member (see my house below).

I began my work by conducting stakeholder interviews with the central leadership. My questions were focused on understanding how the website and other information portals either helped or prevented users from achieving their goals. I interviewed the ICC President, Committee Vise Presidents, Staff members, and house leadership. I took special notice when informants serving different roles and commitment levels in the organization expressed similar pain points.

I synthesized these needs with responses from a survey we sent to ICC members.

A few of the patterns that emerged from this were that most users visited our site to pay their "charges" (a payment by members that goes toward the upkeep of the house, utilities, and food).

Recruitment and Retention committee (ReCo) had been tasked by the board of director's Strategic Plan to oversee the website redesign project, so I regularly attended their meetings. At the meetings, I utilized James P Spradley's Ethnographic methods from "The Ethnographic Interview". I tried to understand the cultural scene and the jargon of the centrally involved members. So, when I reported research findings to ReCo, I used their jargon to describe their cultural scene. ReCo's feedback helped verify that I was accurately understanding the cultural landscape and the perspective of those in it.

Here is a link to my Project plan summary & Steps document I created

I developed a user requirements matrix based on what I learned from interviews. This artifact helped staff and I verify that we were on the same page about the vision of the ICC website.

I met with stakeholders to target our primary, secondary and tertiary users and therefore focus the design on real user needs and behavior.

Another aspect to the project that I worked on simultaneously was the ICC's Intranet. The ICC, like many organizations was struggling to manage their assets and records. Information was scattered among the website, private email addresses, a server at the office, the google drive, paper files at the office, and a financial CMS.

Below is a summary of pain points, our recommendations and some of the models we created while generating solutions.

In summary, I and the member services coordinator architected and migrated the ICC's data to google drive and created role based accounts to preserve institutional knowledge.

You can navigate the old site on web.archive.org

Alongside working on the architecture (I'm an awesome project juggler), I worked on redesigning the homepage of the website. Using comparative analysis notes & stakeholders interviews, I brainstormed some wireframes, and with some feedback from the ReCo and web team, I then started creating hi-fi mockups of home page.

This test plan was developed to aid the ReCo and I to test the usability of the new website's interface.

Due to the constant updating of website data and our budget, I recommended that the ICC use a Content management system managed by a local company instead of developing a custom application. This would enable stakeholders to regularly update the website without needing to submit changes to a specially trained content editor. The ICC's need for regular updates and their complex relational data, led me to recommend WordPress.

We hired a company to develop our Wordpress theme. As we began the development of the website, I regularly met with the company's developer to rely the ICC's needs to him.

I left the ICC in the middle of the this process. I felt happy about the improved usability of the ICC's information.