Website Redesign
CoLife
Overview
For this project, my team and I were contracted by CoLife, a Charleston based home-sharing service. Over the course of 2 weeks my team and I worked to help CoLife improve their web presence by changing the layout of their website to better establish credibility, improve the user experience, and ultimately convert more hosts and guests to their service.
Screener Survey, User Interviews and Scripts, Competitive Analysis, Affinity Mapping, Personas, Problem Statement, Current Feature Assessment, Sketching, Contextual Study, Usability Testing, Documentation, Presentation, Spec Document, Style Guide
Google Forms
Trello
Otter
Sketch
SquareSpace HIG
InVision
Keynote
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Sean Elwood
Lauren Hanson
Kirya Goldfeder
UX Researcher
UX Consultant
UX/UI Designer
UX Writer
Scrum Master
Skills
TOOLS
Team
Role
The Challenge
Building trust is crucial to CoLife's business model, but they felt that the look and feel of their website was not creating enough trust for users to feel comfortable inputting their information to initiate the matching process.
The Solution
My team and I helped CoLife improve their web presence by speaking with CoLife users and more to validate changing the layout of their website to better establish credibility, and improve their overall user experience.
Research
We interviewed both CoLife users and people who have had an experience with room sharing in general. A teammate of mine also conducted a heuristic analysis of the current website, another teammate made the web analytics more digestible, and I created a competitive and comparative feature analysis to gauge CoLife's position in the market.
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Interviews
Insights
Interviewed People With CoLife or Home-Sharing Experience:
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4 CoLife hosts from Charleston
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3 CoLife guests from Charleston
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5 users recruited from screener
• Users loved the idea of the service, but the website did not seem very established to them
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• Users felt like they did not have enough context and many set up a call with the founder
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• Users needed to be able to trust the website enough to allow the service to set them up with people they can trust
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Competitive Analysis
Evaluated companies in a similar or a comparable space in the market:
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Airbnb
Nesterly
Silvernest
Roomster
Roomiematch.com
Apartments.com
and Craigslist
Insights
• 6/7 Companies used delightful features to engage users throughout their experience
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• CoLife has room to automate more of their process and still be on top of the market with human involvement throughout the process
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• Roomiematch.com is CoLife's biggest competitor due to their mission and methods
Synthesis
We then used affinity mapping to synthesize the information that we collected in our interviews and finds trends that emerged to inform our decision making during the design process. This meant creating two different personas to better understand our users, and a problem statement to get us closer to finding our solution.
Personas
Host Persona
Guest Persona
Problem Statement
Susan and Jeff love the idea of having a service that will save them time with their process while still conducting thorough research into compatibility of prospective home-sharers, but they are not entirely clear on why they should trust CoLife.
How might we help them evaluate whether CoLife’s mission and process are a good fit for their needs?
Design
From there we did an assessment of the website to determine, based on our data, what was working and what needed to be redesigned or added. In doing this we did contextual interviews with the existing site, created new copy from the old content, sketched out paper wireframes, which we used to create mid and hi-fi wireframes with their own rounds of usability testing, the feedback from which we used to continue iterating on our design.
Low Fidelity Wireframes
We used the existing sparse website, and sketched out a new flow to provide more context and easier access to information for users. All choices were made based on collected data with the goal of getting users to trust the service based on the website and minimizing the calls to the founder.
Mid- Fidelity Wireframes
Once we had an established flow from our sketches, we used Sketch to start digitizing the wireframes to make it clearer for users in testing. Additionally at this point we began reworking and rewriting copy for the website in order to include some context necessary for the mid-fidelity testing.
High Fidelity Wireframes
After completing a round of usability testing with our mid-fi wireframes, we were able to get a better sense of potential success with the new navigational flow, and get feedback about the provided context. From these tests we learnt that the overall flow worked well, but there was room for additional dropdown menus to provide even more context and shortcuts for users which we included in our hi-fi wireframes.
Initial Hi-Fi
Although are usability testing was overwhelmingly successful and positive we continued asking for feedback from others and found the color scheme and spacing left what to be desired so we iterated on our design to brighten it up and make it more comfortable and trustworthy for our users.
Final Hi-Fi
Delivery
Because this was for a client, we were actually able to include a research report and specifications document in our final deliverables to aid CoLife in their hand off to developers for the implementation of our designs. With the information we delivered, our client can continue to develop their website, implement the changes that we have detailed, and continue to grow their business.