final stretch

I added some new material on the site, after Ramona reviewed what we've done to date. Here's another page I am particularly proud of:

Old:





















New:

Thinking about the project as a whole, the main goals of my redesign are:

• user-centeredness: "Free Mammograms" not "Education and Outreach"
• decrease duplication /complexity of the site -- especially without breadcrumbs
  
• connect money in (race) = money out (grants) --I'm not sure how effectively this is done at this point
• provide a structure for new, interactive features to be added later

And on a more prosaic level:

• Cut what Krug calls "happy text"--there is a LOT of it
• Add images, colors -- I added a simple pie chart on the "What we Fund" page to illustrate the 25% Research/75% Education, Screening and Treatment and while I doubt it adds any significant informational value, it certainly LOOKS better

It looks like we'll need to finish hammering all this out this weekend, myself and Jess--at this point I think it won't be live til the end of the year. Nonprofit decision-making structures: not terribly efficient. Everybody has a stake in this, I guess. We will be presenting it to the board in December, and I suspect further changes will be requested on that front as well. But that's OK, I am looking forward to having the time to get some good tools implemented. I very much want to put the site on my to-be-created Web-based resume, and some bells and whistles won't hurt.

Cool doodads for later:

• Grantee bios/photos-- to personalize "What We Fund"
  
• Sortable list of mammogram providers
• Interactive Mapquest map of all mammo providers, as soon as I figure out how to do it
  
• Provider portal
• Highlight support groups/medical providers that are grantees
• Search function
• Tabs?

Usability results forthcoming, when I decipher my handwriting...

new pages!

One of the 2 main rewritten sections is nearing completion. Here is the old "Education and Resources" page, which have renamed "Komen in our Community": it needs the links still, and more graphics, but already it think it looks tighter and more action-oriented. I hope. I do hate the big "Give" button but Ramona won't let it go! The left nav will be redone still, and the links added in, but the meat of the page is there.


OLD:

Still to be done:

• Home page
• Sortable list of mammo providers (if possible in Convio, Jess says no)
• Map of providers--Google earth is a possibility, but I really don't like having to download anything to view it, and may want Mapquest instead--am investigating
• News--Jess is doing
  

Need to be edited, add links and navs:

• Materials--may reconfigure forms/main page
  
• Komen in our community
• Material request Form--few small changes needed
• Grant pages
  

Done:

• Informational resources

This whole process is taking longer than I had hoped, mostly due to the necessity of getting everyone's input. I will do a simple usability test next week before the pages are uploaded, and then go through the site with Ramona. I am aiming for done but not necessariy
live by next weekend. Woo!

new design!

I had a very productive meeting with Jess and we have hammered out the new Web design, at last!
The old top nav was:

* Home
* Race for the Cure
* Get Involved
* Donate
* Education & Outreach
* Survivors
* Grants
* Events & Photos
* Merchandise
* About Us

and ours will be:

* Home
* Race for the Cure
* Komen in our community
* What we fund
* Donate
* Get involved
* Survivors
* About Us

On the home page, the old left nav was:
Volunteer
Calendar
General FAQ
Donations
Breast Health
Merchandise

and ours is:
Need a mammogram?
Recently diagnosed
Breast Health
Order Materials
Volunteer
Calendar
FAQ
Merchandise


The Grants/Komen in the Community/What we fund/Education and outreach sections will be completely overhauled in this same kind of user-centered (or at least more so) design, so that it is more navigable by activity. I have begun altering the pages and hopefully the new pieces will all be up next weekend.

yet another meeting

I am meeting today with Jess Rosales, the Web admin for Komen Austin, to go over my page ideas and see how they fit into the present site. Jess is responsible for pretty much everything about the Web site, so hopefully i will be able to temper my stepping on her toes by offering to help her fix stuff. The National site has just been redesigned - and looks great! but apparently they've decided that everyone had broadband these days - so now a whole bunch of links on our page to theirs are dead. And their redirect just send you to their homepage, which sucks. I met again with Ramona to talk about where we're at and how best to approach Jess, and she pointed out that all these meetings pretty much reflect the real life process, at least in the Komen Austin world. Getting everyone on board, smoothing feathers, etc. So it is good preparation I guess!

I anticipate Jess will have lots to say about my scheme, and then I will get the final-ish versions of the pages done in Convio over the next week. I'll do some usability testing on them the week of Thanksgiving and then finish it all up the last week of the semester. This project is pretty much guaranteed to go on beyond that, as I get more feedback. In addition, although it is beyond the scope of my project, the site really needs a search function, also. Ramona has been good to me and I want to be sure I've done right by them and made this site as workable as possible.

Web page design begun

Well, with the race finally over (Nov 2) I will finally be able to spend some serious time on the Web pages. I've made test copies of the main pages in Convio, and have been playing with the HTML and the WYSIWYG functions to implement the changes I've discussed with Mary Moore. I think I'll need to understand a bit more about how Convio works to really use it effectively. I will schedule a meeting with Jess Rosales, the Web admin, who is largely responsible for everything on the site as it currently exists. I think she is likely to have some ideas, maybe save me some time, in laying it all out and making it look consistent with the rest of the site.

good health-related sites

Krug mentions some Web awards--I bet they'd be a good reference. I'll see if they have any winners in this category.

Don't make me think (about cancer)

It look me a long time to get around to reading it, but very little time to actually get through Don't Make Me Think which is a terrific endorsement of a usability book, really. And it was really helpful! It was all interesting, but I think that what will be most helpful for this project is his dos and don't of page layout and navigation--I will review the chapters in the polar bear book for more information, too, because I think that herein lies a lot of the problem with our site. People tend to get lost in it.

Some of what Krug says is at odds with the purpose of health-related info on our site, which is interesting. He talks about taking out words, but we HAVE to have them--it is all very heavy on information. How do we know at what point people will just stop looking? I guess that is related to another of his points, which really hit home: you build up a reserve of goodwill (or anger) as you use a Web site, and your trust level that the info will be there, for you to find, and that it will be accurate, often determines frustration level. So we shouldn't hide the contact info (according to Krug) and we need to be sure and minimize the happy talk (there's quite a bit of this about the good we do, blah blah)--and just get people the information they want. And not try to keep hammering the grantee aspects. Seems like a delicate balance. It would be helpful to find a Web site that does this really well-- all his examples are commercial, and I haven't seen a Komen site that really gets it right.

The final and probably most important point that got across to me in Krug's book is the absolute necessity of usability testing, I think it would be inexcusable to not do at least 1 round--I'll email Dr Bias and figure out what the deal is with the Lab. I believe Krug's argument that even slapdash usability testing is still 100 times better than none at all, so, really, it just has to happen. Plus I've never done it before, I think it will be fun (sort of). In a grad school kind of way.