Women’s Resources Reimagined

Conceptualize, design, and create a directory of resources for young women in crisis

Client: Unnamed Women’s Assistance organization 

2020-2022 (and ongoing)

Principal Architect, User Experience Lead, Lead Developer

Project Summary

Our client provides resources and information to young women (primarily college-age) in crisis. Issues they support include unexpected pregnancy, domestic abuse, educational or financial hardship, etc. To better support this mission, they created a directory that analytics and research indicated was challenging to use and did not achieve the intended goals. 

The client engaged our team to improve the system through redesign and redevelopment. 

The Challenge/Problem

The first iteration of the directory was organized around college campuses. An information seeker would have to find their specific campus, then scroll through a somewhat disorganized non-hierarchical list of resources available to that campus. There was a tremendous amount of data in this list. However, there was little ability to search and no ability to filter or refine the results, and it was challenging to discover resources applicable to the user’s needs. 

Compounding this, the organization was growing rapidly, expanding focus beyond college campuses and broadening the scope of the resources they provided and where they referred seekers. We needed to devise a solution to enable the repository to grow and change with the organization and adapt to future scope changes. 

The Solution

We began by working with the stakeholders for the directory. Starting with the resource providers, we conducted interviews asking what they felt their clients needed to discover. They knew the women they needed to reach much better than we would, and they could provide insight into the information they needed to receive. 

Next, we conducted surveys and interviews with the target demographic itself. Complicating this task was the fact that the specific target is women in crisis, and adding research to an already hectic life situation was not an option for us. So instead, we chose to find and talk to a small number of women who had come through crises in the past. We conducted informal research with them and took copious notes about their process for finding help when they needed it. 

The information we gathered in the research phase was illuminating. First, we validated our assumptions that organization by campus was not particularly helpful even to those associated with a campus, and it was off-putting to women who might be near a campus but not actually students. Instead, what women were looking for was typically resources that were close to them geographically and projected expertise, openness, and comfort. 

Openness was something we had not considered strongly before the research phase, but a resource that made the women feel accepted and included was an influential factor women used when choosing resources. 

Turning to the design phase of the project, we began by reimagining the organization of the directory. Instead of using college campuses as the central organizing unit, we would use the resources themselves. We would then create taxonomies to categorize the resources appropriately by the types of assistance offered. 

Addressing openness, we decided to enable personalized introductions for the resources and images of the staff and facility. This would allow women to have more confidence in the resources they chose to contact.

Finally, to address the still relevant need to view resources by related campuses, we came up with the concept of “resource collections”. These would be groups of resources related in some way. The most obvious would be resources that specialized in working with a campus or city (even though they might not be geographically close to that city or campus), but the same concept could be used to collect nation-wide associations of resources, collections for metropolitan areas that span multiple cities and states, or other uses we hadn’t yet considered. The collection concept was a novel improvement of the original campus system that enabled new and innovative ways of presenting resources to information seekers. 

Improvements continued during the development of the system. For example, we added maps and geo-location, enabling the user to visually choose their location or have the system locate them using GPS on their mobile phones. The integration with mapping systems also allowed the user to visualize the closest resources to them.

Internal team members and a selected group of outside reviewers tested the system before deployment. As a result, slight improvements were noted and implemented, and we deployed the system to replace the existing directory at the start of 2022. 

Results

The response to the new system has been exceptional and very positive. In the first month, usage rates for the system went up significantly, and user feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Improvements to the basic usability have led to feedback that now includes recommendations for Quality of Life improvements, such as the ability for resource organizations to maintain their individual records, direct connection of seekers to resources, and the ability for women to provide feedback to the resources they contact.