About Client
The New York Mycological Society (NYMS) is a mushroom club that welcomes individuals with a passion for fungi. Their website, newyorkmyc.org, serves as a comprehensive platform offering a diverse range of resources on fungi, organization details, and acts as a central hub for educating enthusiasts and beginners alike.
Project Overview
NYMS aims to enhance community involvement, achieve diverse growth, nurture interest, and promote awareness of fungi through educational initiatives and research. However, their existing website failed to meet the organization's requirements. As a result, we developed a platform that facilitates easy access to categorized information and encourages active engagement.
15 Weeks | Spring 2023
New York Mycological Society
Product Design | UX Design
Priyanka Jain| Sacchit Vartak | Yuxin Huang
The Exploratory Research phase involves gathering information about the organization, key stakeholders, and the existing site. The goal is to establish guiding principles for designing an effective MVP that serves the organization and stakeholders.
The cognitive walkthrough revealed issues including terminology repetition, page inconsistency, and a clunky design, while the website also suffers from empty pages, disjointed flow, and redundant information. Addressing these concerns is crucial for enhancing overall website performance and user experience.
As an event-heavy non-profit organization, NYMS aims to build a diverse and active community, including NYMS members, other organizations, and their members, to communicate and transfer knowledge about fungus. The website helps them automate membership sign-up and document information.
The competitive audit identified key aspects that contribute to an effective website, such as an organized homepage, concise navigation with meaningful labels, consistent appearance, and relevant and well-structured content.
Literature Review was conducted to get us up to speed on topics such as mycology and designing for diversity. It also helped us understand how other designers dealt with issues we saw in the website.
He is a member of NYMS, experienced in mycology and is dedicated to use NYMS to spread knowledge and using NYMS resources for scientistic purposes.
She is new in the fungi world. She is more interested in learning more about the club and mushrooms, and finding her own interests in fungi field.
To enhance the website experience for both members and non-members, we created a spectrum ranging from information to engagement.
Members such as Paul, who are interested in attending events, will primarily focus on the engagement side of the spectrum, including join memberships, volunteer with the team, and attending events.
For non-members like Charlie, who are interested in learning more about the club and mushrooms, the information side of the spectrum will be their main focus, such as club’s history, learning about mushroom.
Our goal was to ensure that users could easily navigate the website, locate relevant information, and actively engage with NYMS. By providing a welcoming and inclusive platform, we aimed to inspire users to explore, learn, and contribute to the captivating world of mycology.
We developed a comprehensive style guide to maintain consistency and coherence across all of NYMS's digital channels. Following this guide will ensure their brand identity is recognizable and easier for users to understand content.
Considering our clients’ limited capacity on engineers, we decided to adapt our designs into a Wordpress template to ensure the design solution is:
After conducting user testing, we made several valuable changes to enhance the user experience on our platform.
- Added Homepage Category
- Incorporated news articles into relevant categories
- Relocated Lecture Archives under Resources
- Prominently placed INaturalist on the homepage
- Created a specific walk feature (included in documentation)
- Improved the newsletter
We’ve improved the System usability scale from 55 to 87.5. We found 5 participants to test the current website. The current web got 55 out of 100 in SUS, which is marginal in usability. For the new design, we found four participants to test it and the new design got 87.5, which is above 85 and means excellent in usability. Although the sample size is not large enough in statistic, it still indicates a good trend of improvement.
View Website
"It makes it easy for me to design. I want to start designing this yesterday!"
Our client’s feedback has served as a testament to the successful collaboration and the exceptional design solutions crafted to meet their needs. By incorporating their input and leveraging our expertise, we have achieved a remarkable outcome that has improved the overall user experience.
Learnings
As we conclude this case study, it is important to highlight that the collaboration between our team, our professor and the client has been a catalyst for progress. With their approval and excitement, the development phase of the website has already commenced, marking a significant milestone in turning our design concepts into a fully functional reality!
Biggest Takeaway
Throughout the NYMS website redesign, our team embarked on a transformative journey to revolutionize the user experience and create a platform that resonates with our client's vision. Our efforts have been met with overwhelming praise and excitement, as our client exclaimed, "I am speechless! I love it!"
Next Step
For future consideration, implementing a member center on the website would provide several features, such as allowing members to track the events they have attended and connect with other attendees. Additionally, members would receive virtual rewards for their contributions and event attendance, which could encourage active engagement among younger members of the society.
