By creating a simplified menu, and focusing information architecture and user flow on what mattered the design increased user speed and accuracy finding relevant stories and project information.
1. Project Overview
Brief
This project aimed to improve how civil society stories are accessed and read online. The focus was on restructuring the user experience to support readers’ needs when accessing stories using a responsive website.
Role & Involvement
UX Research and Design
As the UX practitioner on this project, I researched, designed, and tested the user experience of a new responsive website for a citizen journalism initiative. Working closely with the project manager, I focused on improving information architecture, navigation, and layout to support faster, more accurate access to stories. My work spanned UX research, design, and writing: delivered through a mix of analogue and digital tools over 3 months.
Client and Project Background
Africa Centre for Society & Migration (ACMS)
Housed at the University of the Witwatersrand, the ACMS is Africa’s leading scholarly institution for research and teaching on human mobility, dedicated to shaping global discourse on human mobility and social transformation. The Method:Visual:Explore (MoVE) project at the ACMS employs arts-based methods to research society and disseminate information to the public. Narratives in a time of crisis is a MoVE project shares stories from migrant citizen journalists. These true stories are the type that rarely appear in established online newspapers, but can help inform those stories that do.
2. Design Challenge
The primary design target was a reader interested in civil society and advocacy content: a reader who seeks relevant, specialist stories on specific topics. This user accesses content on both desktop and mobile devices, often through recommendations or social media. They make quick judgments based on headings, images, and blurbs, and want to find and read stories efficiently, without unnecessary complexity. The website needed to support casual browsers, engaged advocates, and focused researchers alike. These users may not spend long on the site, but expect to navigate quickly to meaningful content and learn more about the people behind it.
Users struggled to find relevant stories and project information on existing story-based websites due to unclear information architecture, confusing navigation, and cluttered page layouts. These issues disrupted the user flow and made it difficult to judge and access content, especially for readers who rely on headings, images, and blurbs to decide what to read. The design needed to support clearer structure, easier navigation, and quicker access to meaningful content across devices.
Help readers quickly and intuitively find relevant, engaging stories they want to read, and access information about the project, contributors, and organisation.
3. Skills and Methods
This project addressed the challenge of enhancing story and information discovery through a user-centered approach.
Initial research, including precedent analysis and competitive benchmarking, revealed common usability issues in existing platforms, particularly around information architecture and navigation complexity, hindering efficient content discovery. User interviews further highlighted that users make rapid relevance judgments based on visual cues and concise text (headers, blurbs, images).
These insights informed the analysis phase, where affinity diagramming, persona development (focused on a user who quickly scans for relevant content across devices), and customer journey mapping underscored the critical touchpoints in the story discovery process and the need to streamline the path to reading.
This deep understanding of user behaviour and pain points shaped the iterative design and prototyping phases. Clear navigation, effective use of visual cues, and simplified user flows were prioritised. Validation through usability testing confirmed the effectiveness of these design decisions in improving the speed and ease with which users could find and engage with relevant stories.
4. Key Solutions
Focuses on critical information architecture and the path to stories and project information. Simplifying the architecture and user flow around “Our Stories” in the main menu allows readers to click directly to the Story List page without being distracted by links to pages like “Project Name,” “About,” or “Media Pack”.
The design uses patterns identified from precedents that help guide users to stories and support them as they move through the content. These include featured content and overviews on the homepage, clear main menus, story lists with categories and tags, story cards with meta information, simple search functions, and consistent story page layouts.
Fewer menu and page navigational choices and simple search, filters, categories, and tags improve user access and focus on stories while ensuring accessible project information.
Images, titles, labels, body text and meta information work in a coherent page layout that guides the reader to and through the stories.
Information architecture, navigation, filter, search, and page layout are primarily focused on ease of finding story content, allowing the site to expand in total number of stories without sacrificing the user experience.
5. Results
There was an increase in speed to stories and key information by about 160%, achieved during usability validation.
Design Impact
The design for this project ensures that stories and project information are easy to find. Usability test and design validation results showed that the discoverability of stories and information improved.
What I learned
Unexpected project changes can mean that requirements change, including usability requirements: Build a minimal viable product based on resources, expectations and what is necessary for initial project success.