Company: Atlanta Pride | Team: Client, Team of 2 (UX Researcher + UX Designer)
Role: Product Design Lead, Project Manager & UX Researcher | Timeline: Jan 2025 - May 2025
Tools: Figma, Qualtrics, UseBerry, Notion, Teams
Atlanta Pride opens its gates to the community but needs a way to make its available resources known to them as well.
To ground the project in institutional reality, our team interviewed Atlanta Pride leadership to map their existing support landscape. We identified that while the organization serves as a critical "entry point" for users into the community but resources like healthcare, housing, and advocacy, lacked a streamlined way for them to be made discoverable to the community.
This session allowed me to define our core Problem Statement: How Might We enhance VISIBILITY and ACCESS to the resources Atlanta Pride currently has?
I was also able to set out the research questions outlined below that we aimed to answer.
How do DIVERSE BACKGROUNDS and LIVED EXPERIENCES of LGBTQ+ individuals influence their resource-seeking behaviors?
What are MOST NEEDED resources and main CHALLENGES users face when trying to find them?
What are the CURRENT PRACTICES that these individuals carry out to find resources?
What FACTORS are important to users when evaluating online resources?
What are ways to improve EXPERIENCE of individuals interacting with Atlanta Pride when finding resources?
We then kicked off our research journey by diving into the secondary research!
Preliminary research allowed us to identify participatory design process, resource categories and user expectations for the hub
To orient ourselves toward global best practices, we conducted a literature review that fundamentally shifted our design strategy which was to engage heavily in participatory design.
Papers on resource hubs for communities
I also conducted a social media analysis by scraping through Reddit and Facebook posts to see the most sought-after resources as well as what users expect to see.
Categories for the Resource Hub
Through Reddit threads and Facebook posts
Finally, just to preface our user research and design journey, we studied other resource hubs to see what users typically expect to see.
Expected Features
of a Resource Hub
Other resource hubs across states, domains and countries
Learn more about my secondary research
We need to focus on intersectional needs and creating a safe space for users to find resources.
To move from assumptions to facts, I led the design and deployment of our mixed-methods survey, where we found that users valued inclusivity, reliability and safety while assessing resources. We also identified groups within this diverse community to probe deeper to find their unique needs by heat maps that I created.
Therefore, we intentionally chose interviewees that belonged to either of these groups.
All of these findings allowed us to identify design implications
Building the IA, validating it and hosting co-ideation sessions, I led the design of the hub that addresses intersectionality at its core and offers trust designing for the users with the users.
Open Card Sorting Session
Based on the social media analysis resource categories I identified, we set out to conduct an open card sorting session where we wanted to understand where the users themselves would expect to find resources.
We conducted this with 6 members of the community who were stakeholders of Atlanta Pride too.
We also conducted tree testing with 8 potential users and HCI professionals to validate the structure. Analyzing it, we identified the resource categories that allowed us to structure the Information Architecture.
Our next step was to conduct a co-ideation session to truly embody the participatory design model we found from the literature review. We recruited 5 participants who have UX and website development knowledge (including us) but MOST IMPORTANTLY were ones who were part of the community as well.
We then built out an impact-effort matrix to identify the features we needed to focus on.
Features to focus on:
Safety / Emergency Code
Tags
Subscription / User Feed
Authority Testimonials
Save / Bookmark Resources
Interactive Map
Filters and Search
Track Record / Past Events
Comparison of Resources
Community Reviews
Sketching & lo-fi prototyping
I finally started making sketches and sought feedback from one of our mentors. Following this, I quickly mocked up lo-fi wireframes and held a quick usability testing session with 4 participants which allowed me to design the hi-fi prototypes.
Design systems, hi-fi prototyping and heuristic evaluation
I then started building out the design system where I created over 30 components, each with a set of variations while maintaining the Atlanta Pride branding. Talking to the developers of the Atlanta Pride team, I also learnt that their website is currently being maintained on WordPress based on which I restricted the component library.
Although the website seems to embody multiple "Primary Colors", I chose to use their Green signifying growth, unity and harmony. Additionally, as this is a given I also ensured the system met WCAG standards.
After building out the hi-fi prototypes, we conducted a usability testing round 2 and a set of heuristic evaluation sessions. Some of the things our users really liked and got a high rating were in the following domains of our prototypes.
Liked Credential of Resources
Liked the identity-based filtering
Liked the reviews with identity.
Some improvements were needed to be made in the following categories.
Improve Terminology & Categorization
Enhance Resource Grouping
Strengthen System Feedback
