Jewish Theatre of Bloomington

The Jewish Theatre of Bloomington is committed to Jewish culture and the theatre. They aim to bring everyone together to view the Jewish experience in the modern world. This was my first client project, meaning we actually met with the clients, and we ended up meeting with their whole board pretty often. They wanted to modernize their site a bit as well as improve the website experience for donors and volunteers.

Overview

Timeline: Jan 2023 - May 2023

Role: Intern

Constraints: Worked within a wix site, meaning no two members could be on the site at once

My Takeaways

This was the project I learned how to conduct myself in client meetings, and what makes a productive design conversation.

I learned a lot from my team leads about how to conduct myself in meetings and they reinforced my confidence in sharing my thoughts with the client.

Final Product

Lights.. Camera..

This client project involved us working directly on their Wix site after several iterations, wireframes, and design meetings.

We started with the typical design brief, agency research and introductory meetings to get a handle on who the company is, what their goals are, and what kinds of things to promote are important. From these kinds of introductory deliverables, we found out that they wanted to modernize their site as well as improve the overall experience for their stakeholders: donors and volunteers in particular.This is important information to have before diving into the design and usability of their site, as we want any changes we make to fuel the agency's mission and design goals.

Our next step was to look at their current site and it's navigation as if we were a new user. We do this to try and identify any pain points for the typical user, as those would need to be corrected throughout the project. After completing our individual run throughs, we came back together as a team to discuss the problems we ran into and completed a sitemap of their navigation.

Now that we were a little more familiar with their site and had discussed some pain points as a team, we moved onto the types of tasks the stakeholders might go about completing, with a watchful eye over donors and volunteers. After learning about the processes the stakeholders would have to take to accomplish their goals, we felt confident in creating tasks for user tests that would give the proper insight to these user journeys.

We brought all of our results to our client meetings and discussed the ways we were thinking of modernizing and streamlining their site. The clients were fantastic to work with and so fun to discuss their site with. They trusted our ideas and had a passion for their company, making every meeting really productive, with a better sense of direction every time. After analyzing the results with the client, we were able to go ahead and make our style guide.

We kept a lot of their same branding but making them a little bolder, showcasing confidence in the design choices. Alongside this, we created our rounds of wireframes, trying to show the clients what we were envisioning for their layouts and features which included more contrast between buttons and text, more cohesion between button colors, and dropdowns for extensive information. I was set to work on their volunteer page, so I was mainly concerned with how to simplify the process of applying to the organization for a more efficient experience. My original thought was to add drop down menus to the page, as users might come to page for either volunteer or paid work, and one should be just as accessible as the other.

Here is a low-fidelity mockup of how I expected the page to turn out. There would be a hero image for visual interest, a way for JTB to entice possible applicants with an image of their working environment, or just an image that's on brand for the theatre. Below that would be the drop menus that a user has the autonomy to make this page fit what information they're looking for. At the time, both kinds of applicants would go to the same place, so I had one button that clearly takes a user to JTB's application form. I had gotten the green light on this design to update their page with the design, and it was once I put it on Wix that I didn't like it as much. The dropdowns in Wix can be a little finicky and overall the page felt empty, so I went back to Figma to try some other design ideas. In the end I decided to use the rich purple to create block elements for each aspect of the page: Paid Opportunities, Volunteer Opportunities, and Volunteer Q&A. This way, each piece of information had the opportunity for more visuals, more color, and I kept the information short and sweet by utilizing "Read more" paragraphs to replace the dropdown, while keeping a similar functionality. The client's approved this design as well and it's what made it to their final site. In the end, my Team Leads taught me a lot throughout this project, and I enjoyed the process of iterating with a client and incorporating their feedback to make them happy with the final designs.

Action!

Homepage - Included to show all the colors the team landed on in action.

Volunteer Page - This is the.page I designed to streamline the application process for paid positions and volunteers. Originally the content was split up so a user would have to scroll to find the open positions as well as how to apply. I made the application buttons readily available as it is the main functionality of the page.