Content-rich Website

The old YMCA Twin Cities website was difficult to navigate and caused many visitors to call customer service just to find out basic information. Additionally, the YMCA wanted to make their mission of helping people more prominent. My goal was to make it easier for visitors to find class information while also refreshing the design and highlighting their non-profit work.

I conducted stakeholder and user research, wrote a strategy brief, conducted a content audit, and created the information architecture for the new site. Additionally, I worked with developers to tie the new site into the Y's third party class registration systems.

The following sample includes select sitemap and wireframe pages from the wireframe deck I created. 

Step 1: Research

In the beginning of the project, I conducted initial stakeholder interviews and light, ad-hoc user research.

Step 2: Content Audit and Sitemap

After initial research, I conducted a content audit on the existing site and worked with the client to reduce old, or unnecessary content and map where new content was coming in. Using what I learned from the content audit, I created the sitemap for the new site.

Step 3: Wireframes

Once I had an understanding of the pages and sitemap for the site, I created wireframes for some of the site pages. I collaborated with the visual designer to incorporate their ideas into the wireframes, where possible and met with developers along the way to ensure my ideas were achievable with the platform we were using. During this process, I also looked for patterns in the structure of pages and used that to document page types on the wireframes. Each page on the sitemap was then mapped to a page type for efficiency during the visual design and build phases.