The problem
Since a major redesign of Marie Curie's website in 2013 the charity's Content team have continually amended and added to the material housed on the site. After 3 years this had led to inconsistencies and confusion in some areas and a need for updated layouts and design ideas.
The solution
The Design Refresh project set out to establish a process to ensure that ongoing content and design updates are done in an environment that considers the end user first and foremost.
This project delivered three distinct outputs for the charity:
- New process - After a short phase of assessment, investigation and conversation with Marie Curie Staff we decided a 'refresh' process to bring order to the situation. This focusses design resource on a handful of elements over the course of a 2/3 week period, prioritised based on clearly determined factors.
- Revised UI elements - The efficacy of this process has been proven by it's ability to produce usable, useful elements for the site. Working collaboratively, two designers define which use-cases the redesigned element will meet, quickly sketch and then visually refine each block. Attention is payed to the responsive behaviour of the block, to ensure visual hierarchy is maintained at all viewport sizes. As more UI elements are resolved we're also determining better semantics and categorisation, to ensure naming conventions reflect a block's intended purpose.
- Rules and guidelines of use – The content team wanted to put in place a set of rules and guidelines for these elements that they could adhere too: What needs does it meet? What content can it accommodate? To what extent is it customisable/flexible? What other UI can/can't it be used in conjunction with? For each new UI element this information is visually detailed.
Going forward we have added to this process a User Testing phase at the beginning and end of each cycle to test our hypotheses and then ensure we have met the stated intention of each cycle.
