Isa Farfan

"Tower Hamlets Friends and Neighbours is a charitable organisation that provides befriending services to senior citizens at risk of lonileness and social exclusion. My task was to improve the visual design, readability and loading time of the website."

Role

Webmaster
UX consultancy
UI design

Tools

Wordpress
Photoshop
Sketch

Deliverables

Heuristic evaluation
Jobs to be done
UX strategy
Web design

Timeline

3 months
(part time)

Scope

This project ran for 3 months (part time)

Audit the current website.
Evaluate competitors (and gather inspiration).
Creation of user journeys.
Lialise with stakeholders to create a timeline to implement changes.
Create prototypes of the redesign.
Develop.

Constraints

The stakeholders were initially resistant to change, so to build trust we agreed to a programme of small incremental changes.

Install analytic tools on the website to measure improvements.
Present strategy and different options to the stakeholders, allowing them to be in control.
Focus on changing as little as possible whilst creating the highest impact.

When I first joined Tower Hamlets Friends and Neighbours (THFN) their website had loading times of over a minute and looked outdated. There were large portions of text and animation that added little value whilst significantly increasing loading times. Some of the text was positioned over pictures, which made it difficult to read.

Prioritisation

After mapping the different kind of changes needed on a prioritization matrix, I lialised with stakeholders and collaborated with them to assign them a space in the matrix with relation to the impact the change will have on the website, allowing them to vote the ones that they needed most urgently and creating a backlog of work I could refer to.

Some of the work to be done required the collaboration of members of the team and volunteers, which took longer. This way we created "two lines of work" one for me to develop on my own and another one that required the collaboration with others.