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A Leap of Faith Counseling Services is an online private practice offering counseling services for individuals, groups, couples, and bariatric patients, as well as offering clinical supervision.
A Leap of Faith Professional Services is an e-commerce site that offers several different professional services such as teen coaching, workshops, notary services as well as public speaking appearances.
Client
Yoshica McCullough, Owner of ALOF Counseling,
Coaching & Consulting, LLC
Timeline
March - August 2023
Team
Lead UX Designer (Hey, that's me!)
Product Manager
Web Developer
UX Researcher
UX/Graphic Designer
Our client tasked us with redesigning her sites to improve usability and narrow down her target market. Our journey began with a comprehensive UX Audit, revealing several pressing issues:
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After discussing the business requirements and the user requirements, we were able to break down the problem and offer viable solutions:
Before embarking on the redesign journey, we analyzed the data from the past six months of the sites bounce rates and visitors to gain a comprehensive understanding of the current landscape:
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ALOF Professional appeared to be an underachiever, tempting us to merge the two sites. However, the services they offered differed significantly, with one requiring HIPAA compliance. Maintaining a familial branding was essential to ensure user recognition.
Following the principles of Hick's UX Law of Similarity, we aimed to harmonize both sites visually and structurally. ALOF Professional's simple navigation structure inspired us to replicate it for ALOF Counseling.
Our design research pointed us towards simplicity and consistency. Wanting to minimize cognitive load, we standardized homepage layouts for both sites, placing all vital information above the fold. For ALOF Counseling, we introduced external links for potential clients to assess if the available services are right for them, however, it was removed for the prototype due to project scope and time constraints.
Because A Leap of Faith Counseling Services site already has an established design system, we decided to create similar branding for both sites. Keeping the logo identical but switching the color palette and typography, it allowed us to create the branding guidelines for ALOF Professional that made ALOF a brand identity.
A usability test was conducted using the platform, Maze. Ideally, we wanted to conduct A/B testing with the original site and our prototype, but because of time constraints it was not possible. Using the low-fidelity version of the wireframes, we tested the functionality of the prototypes and got feedback on it.
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For ALOF Counseling, participants were tasked with completing 5 missions, achieving an overall success rate of 77%. Heat maps revealed trouble spots, particularly in locating career opportunities and guessing the placement of helpful links.
ALOF Professional's participants,tasked with completing five missions as, boasted an impressive 91% success rate. The heat maps displayed a sea of direct success, with only one user navigating indirectly.
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Iterations were made to ALOF Counseling, such as changing the name of the link that directs to the career opportunities page, from "Contract Therapist (or internship/practicum) opportunities" to “Career Opportunities”. Because we want to keep the navigation simple, we did not want to add more options or include a dropdown. Our client wanted a space for helpful links and information and on her original site, there was a link that directed to the “Counselor’s Corner”.
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After the prototype was handed off to our web developer and the sites finally launched, we tracked the sites to see if the design improvements implemented helped one of the initial problems with the sites, the high bounce rate, and the low visitors. The analytics available show:
Overall, our clients Yoshica was happy with what we delivered, and our design decisions helped create a more seamless user experience for her clients. It was a journey marked by collaboration, determination, and a commitment to enhancing the user experience. As well as our hard work, Yoshica herself is a big reason why her site is more successful, she’s great at what she does!
It was a pleasure to work with Yoshica and the Diverse Design Collective, and I’m excited to see the growth of the websites and Yoshica’s business.