Discovery & Research
We started off our research with wanting to understand what’s important for making friendships among musically talented high school girls by focusing on three objectives:
1. What motivates young women to join clubs/programs/groups.
2. What makes music enjoyable for the user.
3. What does girl empowerment mean to you.
Based on our objectives, we were able to conduct user interviews with parents and their daughters. We also lead Instagram polls and Google Surveys to collect more data.
Before jumping into designing, we ran a competitor analysis looking at School of Rock and Youth on Record for insight into what makes them successful. Cleaner navigation, better call to actions, and engaging photos were strengths from our competitors that we wanted to incorporate into the redesign of the Girls Rock website.
Research + Ideate
Next our focus went to the actual navigation of the website and how it is laid out. We performed a navigation heuristic evaluation and found that while the site is functional and usable, there were too many primary labels, and the pages were all text heavy. After doing a card sort, we broke down our navigation to 5 primary labels: About, After School Program, Summer Rock Camp, Resources, and Tutorials.
All of the rest of the information could be designated to the footer so that the focus was on displaying the important information front and center.
Design + Prototype
Before moving on to the high fidelity prototype, we created a style guide for the redesign. We wanted website to be inviting, colorful and inclusive, incorporating the existing photos of previous camps and programs showcasing Girls Rock Denver.
Testing
We ran user tests during every stage of our prototypes. We asked our users to follow the flow we had come up with and perform the same three tasks:
Read about Girls Rock Denver by visiting “HERstory.”
Gather more information on the programs by visiting the FAQ page.
Visit the Summer Rock Page and sign up for the camp.
Using Maze tests on both the desktop and mobile versions, 80% had direct success with the tasks and 20% had indirect success.
Reflections
We would have loved to build out more pages, specifically the multimedia page. This would be a fun way to showcase the talents cultivated throughout the summer camp, and could potentially inspire more girls to sign up.
We unfortunately weren’t able to get in contact with our organization to get more information about Girls Rock and how they market their program, and it would be great to interview them in the future to see how they can connect more with schools.
Community is everything! Everyone we surveyed or talked to had been part of a club or program in the past, or was looking to be in one. However, we were surprised to find out that schools don’t offer a lot of music or arts programs. We hope that more programs like this will be known about and provide better engagement with those seeking these out.
