The Intentional Living Collective mission is to foster deeper community connections and greater social impact by delivering programs and resources that give hope, resources, and social connection to its member.
Their mission is to help people navigate through challenging life transitions.
Supporting their community for more than 10 years they decided to enhance their platform with a new portal called “ The Community Connections Portal.” A place for the community to connect, support and grow.
My contribution was to build the community support pages consisting of a member to member support feature that let people ask for help or offer help to other members.
The new functionality needed to have an easy and efficient search/match process that yields search/match results that are accurate and relevant.
Their desire was to include everyone no matter of age, race, and ethnicity as long as they respect the values of the community. The overall needs/goals for our target audience are:
Our first scoping session was fruithful. The team at TILC had a clear roadmap and vision of the new features. The next steps for me were to:
Get acquainted with the user flows they created, research their website, get available assets, such as the style guide, user stories, personas, and current designs.
My next move was to understand the big picture, seeing their perspective and then narrowing down all the details that I needed to focus on.
This step is critical to understand the whole ecosystem and its intricasies related to existing workflows.
Cal(the CEO of TILC) and I had various conversations about the user flow because I wanted to make sure I understand the rationality behind the decisions they made.
Wireframing is a key component in my design process that helps me and my client to visualize and validate that we're building towards a desired solution.
We went through different iterations until we decided to land on the one presented below.
Since filtering is core to provide a smooth navigation and relevant content I took the time and researched best practices and industry standards around content filtering. A few tings that I learned are:
I thought that the landing page will be the easiest but it turned out to be the trickiest. The people landing on the page are presented with two main paths, Get Help and Offer Help, both having similar destinations.
Getting external feedback confirmed that the content on the landing page was reduntant and confusing.
After sketching out different ideas and layouts I decided to use a module tab design pattern to show individual content beased on the active tab.
The path to a final solution involved 3 feedback sessions with the client and external parties. During these sessions, assumptions were clarified and after several iterations the new product was ready to be incorporated into their platform.
This project saved ~$10,000, allowing TILC to focus on delivering programs to their community members.
