National Garden Clubs

Connect gardeners to their community

Improve site navigation to help users find their way around and accomplish important tasks with ease, reducing the likelihood of getting lost and frustrated.

Users want to:

• Find clubs closest to them
• Join a club
• Donate to the organization
• Sign up for a course at one of the schools

What I Did

Content Inventory

I explored 3 main sections of the site experience: The Board Member Experience, The Regular Member Experience, and The Shop

• I noted in an Excel sheet the different content types on each page of these sections
• I used the information from the content inventory and screenshots from to site to create a presentation deck so that the team could review the current content and brainstorm together

Why I Did It

Logging page content uncovered disruptions in user flows

Through interviews with stakeholders and members, we discovered a common theme of struggling to find information. One stakeholder described the site as "disorganized" and others saw challenges of information not being in the "right place."

• A content inventory allows for a detailed look at what content is on each page.
• In the case of National Garden Clubs, I discovered what types of content were clogging up the site experience and making it difficult to navigate.

What We Learned

Lack of CTA Hierarchy and Clarity

• The site was made up mostly text, images, and a lot of links. These links were often inline and had low accessibility from their color and styling. It could also be difficult to tell what sort of content would open when clicking a link as some would open new pages and others would open PDFs.
• Using these links instead of buttons could confuse the user as to where they should click next in order to find the information they are looking for or complete the task they were working on.
• As a next step, we began working on the sitemap and flows to have a better idea of where each page should guide the user.

Making the pages more modular allowed for easier visibility of the CTA hierarchy and helps the user make their decision in where to head next. I designed this wireframe to create clearer leads to action that a user may take on the page.

Clearer CTAs create clearer paths

Path hierarchies were created based of the most important tasks related to that page.

Results:

• Increase of pages per session from 1.42 to 3.29.
• Organic bounce rate decrease of 22%.
• This contributed to the project being nominated for an Acquia award.

The Next Steps

User Task Analysis

• Engagement with this client ended at site launch. If we were to continue, I would like to perform 2 rounds of task analyses to assess how the current paths are performing.
• For the first round of task analyses, I would gather data to inform hypotheses for improvements, focused on navigation and flows.
• I would then iterate on the current designs based on the insights developed from these findings.
• The second round of testing would be checking the validation of hypotheses formed.