A post about improving the User-Experience from a design standpoint by Hannah Koch
A Need for Clarity
My Group and I were given the daunting task of fixing many issues with the way Furman Universities Counseling Center is marketed to resolve frustration of the student body when using the website and to provide clarity about how the counseling center is operated. Since Furman Students did not understand how to work the website or what exactly they were getting in to it often left them dissatisfied with the care they received simply because they weren’t properly educated on how their system works. One of the major causes of this was the lack of education on the “stepped-care model” which we somehow needed to fix.
Ideas are Cool but How Do You Execute Them?
Going into our project we knew that we wanted to create a video for the counseling center to explain the stepped-care model but… how do we make a video when you can’t violate people’s privacy. Then, we made the bold decision to animate our video. We wanted our video to be three things…
- Informative
- short
- engaging
Based on these goals, we created a great story line and script that we felt were worthy of explaining the model. Initially we wanted to have a story line with our schools mascot as the main character. After several group meetings we realized this approach probably wasn’t best so back to the drawing board. We ultimately decided on doing something strictly explaining what the model was. In order to plan our video we decided it would be best to write our script before we created the storyboard which made the process of knowing what we wanted visually much easier in the end. Here comes my struggle I have absolutely NO idea how to do that. I thought “oh it can’t be that hard”, well it took me about three hours to get a ball to bounce on adobe animate after countless YouTube tutorials so the reality of that being our animation platform became very unlikely. Our teacher kindly showed us some animation platforms that, thankfully, are much easier to operate.
Taking a Bad Website to a Great One
In Multimedia Storytelling it says “When designing a site it is vitally important to understand your audience” (pg. 144). This is incredibly important to me as the objective of this project is to provide the audience with a better experience. In order to better understand the audience I walked through the website as if I was in need of the counseling center services. I found out that the current website is…not good. Aside from it obviously being outdated, it lacked clarity and practicality which I set out to fix.
Thankfully, this summer I gained a lot of experience working with a brand and knowing how to create online content that was “on-brand” for them. Despite never creating a website due to my past experiences I felt very confident going into this part of the project. I have learned about wire-framing a lot in class but to be honest I have not been doing this. Instead my method has been just playing around with my platform Wix, until I am happy with the results. One of the major issues in using the current website is that it is incredibly difficult to actually locate the tab for scheduling an appointment. I assumed that most students who go on the site do not want to read a thousand things before they get to that. So to fix this I put scheduling an appointment, front and center on the landing page. Although, I am not done with the website I still need to plan for the images I want to take to feature on the website, and add several other things I am very happy with how it is looking and functioning.
Success in Sight
Although there is still so much to do in our project such as:
- meet with Director of Counseling Center
- re-create the video story board
- animate the video
- take pictures for website
- work on website
I am proud of the work I have already put into this. Although parts of this project have taken me out of my comfort zone it has ultimately made me more confident in my abilities. At the begging of this I was honestly stressed an unsure of how I could accomplish this and make my client happy. Now, despite the work still needed to be done I can see the finish line and it is looking good.
Advanced Multimedia Storytelling 