Project: Facebook Data For Good- Redesign Strategy
My role: UX Strategist
Activities: Stakeholder + User Interviews, Competitive Analysis, UX Audit, Journey Mapping, Sitemap Creation, Design Workshops, Prototyping, Testing
The Challenge
With the COVID-19 pandemic, Data for Good has seen an increase in interest and visibility within Facebook and across the world. The existing site didn’t efficiently drive users to valuable information or Calls-To-Action and is difficult for the internal team to manage.
Facebook partnered with PRPL to rebuild a user-centered web experience on their stack that enables visitors to quickly and intuitively access content on the site to support their mission of supporting humanitarian efforts with anonymized data.
Goals
Data for Good (DFG) needs a site with an enhanced information architecture and design that accomplishes the goals of:
1. Emphasize FB’s intent and impact with DFG.
2. Improve visibility and access to data
3. Engage and onboard partners
4. Enable tracking and measuring of user engagement
5. Ease of site maintenance
Process
Align + Define
- Conducting stakeholder and user interviews to understand both business and user goals, needs, and pain points with the existing site.
- Conducting competitive analysis to look at how some other organizations that provide data for social good have organized information on their sites and instances where we feel they were effective in displaying their content that could be used as inspiration for structuring content on the new Data for Good site.
- Conducting a UX audit to identify ways to better structure and organize existing content, create a data-informed plan for content migration and url redirects, and plan for what components might be needed.
- Documented user types and flows to understand the types of users to solve for and their journeys to base solutions of off.
- Created sitemaps and conducted card sort tests for the main navigation and footer.
- Presented the strategy to the client for sign off. (View deck here.)
Content + Architecture Findings
Awareness
Product details, visualizations, and case studies should be featured more prominently as they are the main way users select data sources. Currently this information isn’t organized in a way that highlights the information needed for decision making.
Activation
The method of actually accessing the data- a key goal of the site - is buried at the bottom of the respective tools pages potentially resulting in users missing it.
Navigation
As DFG’s product offerings continue to grow and support various industries they no longer fit into the current Public vs Private categories therefore the site architecture and navigation should take into account scalability.
UX Findings
Digestibility
The valuable content on pages is overwhelmed by dynamic graphics, decorative images, and iconography.
The amount of scrolling to get to valuable information is overwhelming and can result in abandonment and the use of deep linking content can cause users to miss useful resources.
Discoverability
The respective Tools pages do not immediately surface the most important details about a dataset, especially how to access it.
The new site should be designed around the facilitation and guiding of users’ discovery and decision-making regarding tools and datasets.
Accessibility
The use of copy in Calls-to-Action need to be designed and written in a way that encourage users to take actions. The current CTAs do not stand out amongst the rest of the page.
The use of educational video is helpful but the videos do not provide accessible elements like captions or text transcripts which poses problems for those with visual disabilities.
User Flows & Sitemap
Facebook Data for Good users can be split into 3 groups. While each group has unique goals for their work they overall share common motivations for engaging with the site.
- Learn about the work DFG has supported
- Find data to use in their research / work
- Learn how data is being used for COVID-19
General Researchers
- NPOs and NGO’s
- Universities and Academics
Operational Orgs + Businesses
- National and Local Govts
- Public Health Officials and Policy Makers
- Disaster Preparedness and ResponseOrgs
Press
- Journalists
Design + Refine
- Crafted simple content priority guides in Google Docs to begin organizing the most important to least important content on the pages to inform the designs.
- Facilitated design workshops with the project team using Slack and Miro and sketched various designs for the pages.
- Guided creation of wireframes and prototypes in Figma and led client feedback workshops to refine designs.
- Saved over 12% of the research and design budget.
Implementation Planning
- Once designs were approved, I began planning the most efficient way to break down the designs into requirements for the developers that also made the most sense for the client.
- Documented requirements and led refinement sessions with the project team to ensure development had all they needed to work.
- Collaborated with development on implementation planning, including estimations and populating sprints.
