Providing a Safe Haven for Clients

Product Design Case Study

TLDR;

Lead Designer supporting a local family business with their goal to redesign and modernize their company website.

Note: This project is currently in progress, and as such, this case study is still under construction.

Background

The Angels Garden team has been wanting to upgrade their website’s look and feel for a while now.

I’m working directly with the Founder and Owners to understand their goals and how they envision this website scaling as their business continues to grow. My goal is to help translate the clients’ passion for older adult care and their unique market standing through a modern digital presence.

Discover

Our goal was to uncover current baseline understandings of XR and how GMU faculty perceive this technology.

I facilitated 2 stakeholder interviews and market research to gain insight into:

  • the company’s history and market standing;

  • the client’s vision for the new website; and

  • how it fits into their overall business objectives.

I also did some market research to understand the general landscape of the industry.

  • Current State Analysis -

  • Competitive Analysis -

  • Comparative Analysis -

Initial Insights

The interviews surfaced some strengths of XR, challenges preventing wider adoption, and potential design opportunities.

Strengths:

  • Students are often innovative in their utilization of XR tech and enjoy using it

  • Low entry point, users can start with simple XR tools that are widely available

Challenges:

  • Wide range of faculty’s familiarity with XR tech

  • Many constraints to consider (e.g., cost, time, staffing)

Opportunities:

  • Demonstrate value-add to faculty

  • Create fun and simple learning experiences

  • Leverage remote elements to supplement in-person training

Define

We synthesized our research and created various data modeling artifacts to help us make sense of all the information we collected.

These artifacts included:

  • Work Activity Affinity Diagram - mapped out initial groups such as relationships, challenges, desires, outcomes, personas, aspects of training, and potential impacts.

  • User Work Roles - illustrated how different users would interact with the Lab.

  • Flow Model - identified pain points and visualized relationships between users and stakeholders.

User Stories

We identified 4 main stakeholders and created 8 user stories that would inform our design intervention.

Stakeholders, in order of priority:

  1. Faculty

  2. Instructional Technologists

  3. Students (current and prospective

  4. Stakeholders (internal and external)

Sample User Stories:

  • As a professor, I want training for XR technology to fit into my already busy schedule so that I don’t have to sacrifice the quality of my teaching or research to learn a new technology.

  • As an internal stakeholder, I want the university to be a leader in teaching and learning so that we can attract more students, funding, and recognition.

Overall Takeaways:

  • Faculty and Instructional Technologists have varying expectations of how much individualized training and support should be provided.

  • They agree that initial training shouldn’t take much time away from daily tasks.

  • Student and stakeholder considerations showcase potential motivating factors for faculty to learn and demonstrate their new skills in XR.

Design

Although a training intervention was still relevant, we discovered that our core challenge was to educate GMU faculty on the uses of XR and the resources the Lab provides.

Ultimately, we shifted our MVP from a training and certification program to an information repository. Our new goal was to establish a web presence to educate faculty on the existence of the XR Lab and the technology and resources it provides within an educational context. The website would also provide users with a portal to enroll in training and/or schedule consultations with an Instructional Technologist.

Our design process started with sketching initial concepts before moving into more refined wireframes.

  • Design Studio - facilitated an interactive brainstorming session to sketch and align on some initial concepts.

  • Moodboard - balanced GMU visual branding while adding modern design elements to keep up with the high-tech, innovative feel of a lab.

  • Wireframes - translated initial sketches into lo-fi wireframes and connected our user stories to each element to ensure we met our defined requirements.

After an initial design critique, we iterated and then transitioned to high-fidelity wireframes for usability testing.

Usability Testing

Our goal is to test the proposed information architecture and further explore mental models around assisted living care.

Usability testing has not yet started.

Deliver

The final output of this project will be a newly redesigned website, hosted on a platform that allows the clients to easily make updates as their business grows.

Website launch is targeted for the end of 2025/early 2026.

Reflection

I plan to take some time to reflect on my work and how I can improve in the future.

I’ll come back to this once the project has been completed!

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