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.

user informational needs

I met with Mary Moore last week and it looks like the educational materials and contact info on the Web site are, for the most part, up to date. She went over for me the kinds of questions she encounters, what kind of info people are commonly looking for, and what the process usually is for them to find the answers to typical questions. The upshot of it all is that most of the answers are in fact on the site, but people don't understand how to find them, and often they also don't understand what the terminology means. For example, people often need breast screenings, not mammograms, but they don't know what screenings are and thus can't find the contact info on the site--we decided to get around this by setting up a button that says, "Free Mammograms" and pulling people in that way, to explain the difference later, rather that trying to educate them first.

I showed Mary Moore the map on the Houston Web site and we agreed that a simple Google maps function is all that we really need in Austin. We like the idea of the form they use to sort, but Mary Moore says that since everything is county-specific, we need only forms that have a dropdown list of services in each county. I should have enough PHP to build this, from the info on the site in other places and some additional resources that she gave me.

Another concern is the rapidity of change in these services, especially out in the outer counties, but I think that planning to update the site at each grant period will be a good way to ensure that someone reviews all of the info at least twice a year. Additionally, since Komen funds the majority of the services, we are going to limit the services listed (where possible) to the grantees, so that we can guarantee their quality.

We also discussed forms to capture more information about how educational resources are used. Because people tend to call or email her directly for scheduling presentations and health fairs, Komen has no way to track the distribution or the cost of materials given out. Removing her contact info and replacing it with a form seems like a good idea, but I am ambivalent about deliberately making it more difficult for people to reach us. I may take this to Ramona, and/or see if there's a less annoying way to capture the info Mary Moore wants.

Finally, Mary Moore also stressed the need for it to be as clear as possible that Komen is the engine behind many of these services, and to relate all this to the Race for the Cure. The Race raises the money to fund all of these clinics and hospital departments, but now on the site there are no crosswalks from Race to Grantee info (such as how to apply) to info for individuals who need services. It will be a challenge to develop these without getting people hopelessly lost! Or rebuilding too many pages. I hope to have some outlines for some of the indivigual pages done soon, to get Mary Moore's input. I also bought the IA polar bear book and am referring to it for guidance on how to set up the navigation to try and link these multiple concepts without further confusing everybody.

meeting scheduled

I have scheduled a meeting for this weekend with Mary Moore Cavanagh, the Director of Education and Outreach at Komen Austin. I want to get her feedback about the kinds of health questions people have when they call her, especially since they do not seem to seek information over the Web--not that it's on our Web site anyway. I wonder if the kinds of things they want to know are more comfortably asked of a person? or perhaps they know from previous experience what kinds of info are on the site? or, since many of the questions we get are from women looking for free care, perhaps they do not have internet access and got the phone number from some other source. I am interested in both who contacts us, and what kinds of info would be most helpful for them. Mary Moore has been at Komen for years, and also talks to other Affiliates and travels to the national office in Dallas on a regular basis, so she should be very helpful.

Web usage logs

I found the usage logs on Convio and have begun to analyze them. Some of the data within might be useful, if I can provide context. I was looking to see if anything jumped out on the educational pages, how usage compared in race/nonrace season (who looks us up in Feb, the slowest month? and why?), and how people arrive/depart the site. I want to know if they're looking for educational info and if they found useful information. The available stats, broken down by month, include:

• time of visits--41% under 30 secs in Sept! even higher in the non-race season-- 70% in Feb
• pages viewed: in Feb, race info (even at 9 months away), some participatory stuff like volunteer info and calendars, contact us, then eventually education/outreach, below merchandise. In Feb 175 views total, of 4600 visits.
• people look at work--all usage is lower on the weekends.for both seasons.
  
• search: people use the name, not general queries. they already know of our existence, I guess. Breast cancer Austin will still get you there, though.
  
• lots of people leave after finding the contact info--that page is 6th on the exit list in Feb. In Sept, race season, it moves down to around 20th. At least the race pieces generally work well, and better than they did last year it seems, if I can make the assumption: contact us was the exit page 900 times in Sept 97, 770 in 2008.
  
• entry: in Sept, from race donation pages, from the National site on the find-a-race page, and from local sponsors and big teams. In Feb, they came from the national site (find an affiliate), from volunteer stuff--I did not realize that was so important, although many of those may be repeat visitors--and local media outlets. NONE of them came from health resource sites.

I picked up Don't make me think, the book Dr Bias uses in his usability class, to try and give myself some background on what this stuff might mean and what we need to do to improve it. I will report on that in the next couple of days. There may be more reports that could be helpful also, I'll keep poking around Convio.

Houston Affiliate

The Houston Affiliate of Susan G Komen has a tab labeled "education" that takes the viewer to a page that offers a variety of information, in a somewhat haphazard manner. There is topical information--"Headlines"--2008 statistics, a blurb about breast cancer generally, screening recommendations, breast cancer myths, some studies offered, and a left nav with a bunch of links to other pages that are equally disparate. As with San Antonio, and for that matter, Austin, there is little sense of what the user might be looking for on the page. Perhaps information should be sorted into categories of general (2008 stats, general cancer info) and personal (I am _years old-- do I need a mammogram?).

In this case the SEARCH FOR A FREE or LOW COST MAMMOGRAM FACILITY is located within the "screening recommendations section, which indicates that they know the information seeker is likely to be interested not in a general, aimless way but in the immediate. personal sense. Again, though, this link is just a word doc with phone numbers and addresses. I had heard that Houston undertook a collaboration to produce a service-provider map on the site, but this link was on the home page, not on the education page. I found it under the name breast cancer portal. There's lots of good stuff here, including legal services (which I have seen at no other affiliates) but again, it is just basically a list. The map is not on the affiliate site, it turns out, but rather here on the partner's Web site. It allows you to search by a total of 14 fields, some of which are duplicates--do you need Zip code and city/county?--and many need more explanation. There are terms used that will be mysteries to the vast majority of nonprofessionals, especially in the "clinic type" section. If the user has to call Komen with questions, the advantage to this degree of detail will be negligible.

While this interacive map is impressive in its way, and especially useful I think for a city as lage and diverse as Houston (I liked the "languages spoken" especially), I wonder at what point this degree of complexity becomes more trouble than it's worth in terms of keeping the info up to date and maintaining the technical aspects of the site. Would a list of providers in an geographic area, payments accepted, hours of operation (maybe), and some degree of clinic type not be more helpful? The user will have to contavt each clinic anyway. Then we could spend more of our page space explaining the meanings of some of the terms used, rather than providing an excessive number of searchable options. It also doesn't work in Firefox, and requires a software download to use.

The Komen Houston site, I think, is the extreme end of Web site sophistication, I think both more than we need and really more than we want for Austin. I think the next steps, now that I know what kinds of resources are offered in other cities, is to begin collecting usage data from Convio and researching some design principles to focus my work-up around. I have an intuitive sens of both of these aspects, but I think it's time to begin gathering data. I will, however, continue to hunt around for affiliate ideas we can borrow, for the duration of this project.

San Antonio Affiliate

I have begun my environmental scan of the Web sites of other Komen Affiliates, with regard to their presentation of educational material, and so far the best site I have seen belongs to our neighbors in San Antonio. They have education/health-information materials divided into "Education and Outreach" and "Resources." The education page contains a list of books, and the resources page has available pamphlets--none of which is available on the Austin site. While there are some design and editing issues--the link to "Children's Support Groups" takes you to a link of children support books--and it would be nice to see Web resources as well as books, the education section offers at least a place to start.

Both the resources and the free educational material however would benefit from a link or at least explanation as to how to acquire this material. For the brochures, should they call the office? Order from the national office? In effect, offering free material while useful in explaining what the office has may in fact result in creating more work for the affiliate in fielding these requests. I think that we should have something like the available materials page but link it to the National site and suggest that they be ordered from there. Although perhaps this would suggest that people should contact the National site for, say, health fair presentations, which is not desirable. I will have to figure out the best way to handle this. For the books, I wonder if the library has them? A link to the online catalog page might be a good way to go.

I was going to complain that the site had no local resources--but there is a link, hidden on the Resources page in small font, that says "Click here for a listing of local organizations providing low cost or free services to women." The link is a Word doc, with a list of addresses and phone numbers, much like the one our site. As with ours the focus is on free or low-cost mammograms, when in fact often women are looking for other services as well. There is also a certain amount of jargon--"patient navigation" and ambiguity--what are "services"? They have information about transportation, though, which is great. This site definitely gives me some ideas for ours, but I will keep looking to see if there are any affiliates who offer local resources in more depth, with more information, or with more features (like maps) built in.