Bridging the Communication Gap
Desktop and Mobile Web App for Genneration Connect
Efficent & Accessible Communication for All Ages
Generation Connect is a client-facing B2B2C application that creates opportunities for seniors and teens to develop a symbiotic relationship. I worked with Generation Connect to create a straight forward responsive web and mobile site that helps juniors track their paid/ un-paid volunteer work while effectively communicating with the older generation.
3 Week design sprint
What did I work in?
Figma
Adobe Photoshop
Trello
Teammates
Lan Dinh
Amelia Muzenberg
Client
What I Did
I worked swiftly as a UI Designer and UX Researcher. Along with prototyping the product, I was responsible for hi-fidelity wireframes, graphics, and the design system. I maintained communication between the teen teem, senior team, and marketing lead of Generation Connect in order to nurture a consistent design through both products.
I also worked as the main source of communication between my team and the teens; gathering users for user testing and quickly analyzing the data.
Generation Connect's Goals
During our first meeting with Generation Connect’s founder and the design/ marketing lead, they presented their website that was developed using the no-code platform bubblie.io. This product was created while also running focus groups and various activites between seniors and teens in order to test the platform.
While going over the scope of the project, we found that the company was very flexible with design ideas and were open to us re-designing their current home page in order to help achieve their goal of making the site more intuitive and accessible for both seniors and teens.
Research and Explorations
Generation Connect presented us with their own research and insights they gathered throughout their focus group activities. My team and I decided to do our own research and compare our results and insights in order to help us make stronger design decisions. In order to identify the users needs and expectations, I conducted user screeners and interviews on 10 teenagers between the ages of 13-19 years old. The teenagers had previous volunteer experience and have a history of closely interacting with seniors.
After gathering three main insights from affinity mapping the data points from the user interviews, we found that...
We used the insights I highlighted to create our teenage user persona, Maya Anderson. My team and I used Maya along with her behaviors and goals to inform all the design decisions we made.
After developing the user journey for our persona, we found three glaring issues in Generation Connect's original user flow and re-developed a new one using research gathered from interviewing both the teens and seniors.
Informed & Accessible Design
Genneration Connect's website was created using a premade template but with colors chosen by the GC team. There were no IA or UI issues at first, until the product was shown to the senior group and multiple accessibility issues arose regarding typefaces and color contrast.
Since both the teens and seniors would be visiting the same landing page, accessibility for both parties was super important. Seniors have different requirements and skills when it came to technology, ability to distinguish color, and layouts. The senior team chose complimentary colors with high contrast and sans-serif typefaces that all have high accesibility scores.
We deduced from teen interviews that teens like brighter colors on the sites that they frequented, so I went for a bright green that symbolizes growth and energy on the teen marketplace. We decided to assign certain colors with the services available for teens to offer to seniors, so that they would be able to easily identify and differentiate them across the marketplace and in their calendar.
Metrics
The product was recently shipped and we recieved a positive retention rate of over 150% after implementing the new user flow.
4 Usability tests of the redesigned protoypes for the mobile and desktop platforms were conducted. We found that teens are 'click-happy' and try to explore the site as quickly as possible. This means that teens can get bored easily if the website does not keep their interest.
Moving Forward
Future KPI's we recommended were to measure satisfaction scores and track acquisition and retention. Engagement is exreemely important in order to maintain transactional activity and increase teen to senior interactions. We would also like to continue improving the website's information architecture, since that information is what will maintain a teen's interest in the product.