NAMI Central Texas: A Story About Conducting User Research and Making Informed Design Decisions

Overview
Background: Who is NAMI?
NAMI stands for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. They provide educational programs, resources, and run events for anyone looking for support on mental illness, whether that’s someone struggling with a mental illness, someone with a loved one with a mental illness, or even community members that work with someone struggling with a mental illness.
The Challenge:
Restructuring the NAMI Central Texas website information architecture to make the navigation intuitive for the various user-types, and updating the WordPress theme to reflect NAMI’s values of Calm, Safe, and Secure, over the course of 12-weeks.

My Role:
Lead User Researcher Designer 
My responsibilities as lead user research designer on this team included:
  1. Scheduling interviews with our client and users
  2. Creating and conducting tree-tests
  3. Moderating card-sorting sessions
  4. Analyzing research to make informed design decisions

​Tools Utilized:
  1. User Interviews and Observation
  2. Tree-testing
  3. Card-sorting
  4. Feasibility chart (Analysis)
  5. Gloomaps (Information Architecture)
  6. Sketch
Reach out to me to schedule a presentation of this case study.
Problem Definition
Our clients at NAMI Austin had done a lot of generative research on their own, and felt a redesign was necessary because:
  1. They were receiving phone calls on a daily basis from their users regarding issues with navigating their website.
  2. ​They were rebranding to NAMI Central Texas and felt their website visual design was outdated and didn’t reflect their values of Calm, Safe, and Secure.

Because NAMI had found these problems through their own generative research, and we were working on a short timeline, I decided it was best to focus on validating these issues through evaluative research.
Original NAMI Austin home page:
Research Validation and Discovery:
  1. During our user interviews, it became clear the users felt confused about the names of the various classes, workshops, and support groups due to the lack of description within the class names.
  2. I conducted a usability testing during our interview sessions to validate this issue, and I learned that the users felt unsure of which classes, workshops, and support groups will meet their needs. 
NAMI Workshops, Classes, and Support Groups:
  • Peer-to-Peer
  • NAMI Connection
  • Family-to-Family
  • Friends & Family
  • NAMI Basics
  • Family Support Group
  • NAMI Homefront
  • Bridges to hope
Recurring Interview Answers from Users and Client:
       I don’t understand these class names.”

“People call when they can’t find what they’re looking for on the website.”

“I didn’t know there’s a calendar!”
Success Criteria:
Quantitative (Google Analytics, Tree-testing)
  • Increase Donations post-launch 6 months
  • Increase Appropriate Class Enrollment
  • Correct match for NAMI Programs, Support Groups, Presentations, Donors
  • A decrease in Support Calls
  • Improvement of tree-testing tasks being successfully completed
Qualitative (User Testing) improvements on access volume
  • Feedback from client (e-mail)
Outcomes:​
  1. My team member moderated a tree-test using the original tree-test I created to validate the changes we implemented on the NAMI Central Texas website. The tree-test task success rate went from 60% to 86%​​.
  2. The design went live within a month of our deadline. We were hoping to have it ready by the beginning of May 2019 for Mental Health Month, but due to the timing of deliverables and limitations of the volunteer developer, the website launch date was closer to June 2019. We lost our opportunity to see the spike in users during May, Mental Health Month, however, the feedback we received after the launch in June made our success even more pronounced.
Original Tree Test:
Check out the full results here.
Comparative Tree Test:
Check out the full results here.
Impacts:
Email from Client at NAMI Central Texas:

"Hi all,
I just wanted to follow up with y'all now that we have officially changed our name and launched our new site. We had a recent success story I wanted to share: 

Earlier this week, one of our program coordinators decided to use the website instead of a powerpoint that she had previously developed for a virtual volunteer info session. After the session, she said it was way easier to navigate the new website (and made more sense for folks on the call) than the powerpoint she used to use.
       We also received 3 volunteer applications right after the info session, which is unheard of!”
Thank you again for your work on this!"

​Katrina Anaya
Director of Operations at NAMI Central Texas
Before:
After:
Audience
Current Users of the NAMI Austin Website
  • “I am living with mental illness seeking educational opportunities for myself and/or resources offered by NAMI Austin”
  • “I am a family member of someone living with mental illness seeking educational opportunities for myself and/or resources offered by NAMI Austin”
  • “I am a community member or group seeking presentations, resources, and/or education opportunities”
  • “I’m a donor seeking to make a donation to NAMI Austin”
  • “I’m a volunteer seeking to learn more about volunteer opportunities at NAMI Austin”

Client: NAMI Central Texas
  • Lissa Adams - Board member (interviewed)
  • Katrina Anaya - Director of Operations (direct contact for scheduling research sessions with users and decision making)
  • Christina Schneider - Community Relations Coordinator (direct contact for decision making)
  • Bianca - Intern (interviewed)
  • Krista - Intern (interviewed)

No personas were created for this project due to a constrained timeline. However, there was a lot of discovery through our interviews, and we were mindful to conduct our interviews so users felt safe and secure to open up to us about their struggles with the website. Listening to them and watching them struggle really helped us understand how frustrating it can be to need help, and not be able to access the help you need due to confusing navigation and unclear terms.
The Team
Challenges:
  1. Different responsibilities and schedules made it a challenge to meet up to collaborate, get feedback, and make decisions on a regular basis
  2. ​Not having a unified communication language made it tricky to effectively share our concerns and ideas with one another
Structure:
​We started out relying heavily on Slack to communicate our findings or get feedback. However, this ended up causing more stress to the team due to our differing schedules causing delays between responses and confusion among feedback/decisions

​
Our professor stepped in to help us structure our communication in a more effective way:

  1. Together, we set up two weekly check-in meetings. First, we would check-in on Slack to see if anyone had any big updates or needed feedback, then hop on Hangouts to communicate. 
  2. For minor things or small updates, we would communicate on Slack during that time window. 
  3. On Fridays, we would meet in person to share in-depth updates, get feedback, and make decisions. 
  4. In between check-ins, we would reach out on Slack for minor things (ex: “where is ___ document?”) and then hop on Hangouts when the time allotted for more major things (“I’m confused about ____, can someone help?”). Setting up weekly check-ins improved our work ethic and overtime our group dynamic shifted towards a more collaborative environment.
Making Decisions:
Constraints
  1. We had 12 weeks for this project to research, design, and implement. We relied on our client to help coordinate scheduling interviews, tree-testing, and card-sorting with our users. 
  2. Our user base needed extreme care during communication due to the stigma associated with their condition. 
  3. We had planned to move into the design phase by mid-February, but we ended up conducting our research well into March to conduct card-sorting sessions with our users.
  • Card-sorting was suggested in the group to collect more user data before we move onto the design phase. Our limited time to understand and conduct card-sorting caused us to be unprepared when conducting our card-sorting sessions. None of us had done card-sorting before, and we didn’t have enough time to practice before conducting our sessions.
  • There was a ton of confusion among all of the team members during this phase of the research. The spreadsheet we collaborated on to make our cards was confusing, and most of our team members hadn’t filled out all of the cards needed of our sessions and we wound up with unnecessary duplicate cards, and the class descriptions we wrote out were long and confusing to our users. 
  • ​During the card-sorting sessions, users would stop frequently to make sure they were “doing it right.” They seemed just as confused about the process.
Despite all the pitfalls we ran into, we did learn how our users approached the website from a task and role centered approach:
  1. “I’m a [parent, teacher, spouse] 
  2. I need [education, resources, help]
  3. For [me, a friend, a student]”

If we had more time to prepare for these card-sorting sessions, I would have done 3 things:
1. Prepare
  • Prepare ALL of our cards ahead of time on a digital platform, such as Optimal Workshop.
  • ​Regroup ahead of time to make sure we had all of the cards we need 

2. Practice
  • Run through practice sessions with each other to learn card-sorting best practices, and align on how we want to conduct our card-sorting sessions.
    ​
3. Iterate and ask
  • Do we need all of these cards? Can we omit any? Are there any duplicates?
  • Can we re-word this description more concisely?
  • What is our goal with these card-sorting session?
The Design Process
This is what my process looked like as the Lead User Researcher in this project.
  1. Define the problem: In this case, the problems NAMI presented to us - users struggling to navigate the website and the outdated design.
  2. Validate the problem: I validate the problem using various research methods such as user interviews, tree-testing, and card-sorting.​
3. Synthesize and Analyze findings: I synthesize the collected research through a feasibility chart with the team in order to brainstorm a design solution that addresses these problems.
4. Solution: I decided to take a task and role center approach to the new navigation of the website. Once I came up with a new navigation structure for the website using Gloomaps, my team member moderated another tree-test to compare the results to our first tree-test.
Retrospective
Things that went well include:
  • Staying on track 
  • Working through communication issues
  • Delivering on time

Things that didn’t go well include:
  • Communication (in the beginning)
  • Feeling unprepared during card-sorting
  • A lack of team spirit in the initial stages of the project

Next time I will be more proactive in learning about research methods more in-depth, effectively sharing these research methods with my team through practice runs, and do my best to keep everyone on the same page. 

I will continue to stay grounded in the work we’re doing, keep the goal and user needs in mind at all times, and reach out for feedback.

Lessons I learned include the importance of effective communication - misunderstanding was a big part of this project. Getting everyone into the team mindset is important - we’re all individuals working interdependently to accomplish the same goal.