Product Design
How Do We Elevate Engagement and Foster Categorized Information Sharing for Mycology Enthusiasts: The New York Mycological Society
The New York Mycological Society (NYMS) is a mushroom club for anyone interested in fungi. The NYMS aims to increase community engagement and foster a diverse community of mycology enthusiasts. They seek to generate interest in understanding the symbiotic relationship of fungi in the environment and to raise awareness about fungi through education and research. Their website contains organization information, various fungi resources, and events calendar. However, their current website didn’t meet their organization’s needs.I contributed to building
To familiarize the whole team with the visual language and content flow of the pages. I conducted a cognitive walk-through to understand the user's perspective while browsing the NYMS website.
It was vital to introduce the entire team to the existing information architecture of the website and to understand the organization of the content across the pages.
I assisted my teammates in benchmarking the NYMS website against the other Mycological clubs across unites states based on 4 factors to understand the areas of opportunity while designing the new website.
We conducted 6 user interviews followed by usability testing of the existing website to understand the expectation of the members from the website and to gather feedback on the current website.
The questions for the interview and usability test were based on the following themes:
1. Motivation and goals while exploring the NYMS website.
2. Finding the information related to the events hosted by NYMS
3. Understanding how the fungi resources are used by the users.
4. Understanding the expectation of the membership with the NYMS.
The interview also helped our team to identify the types of users that would be interacting with the website.
The interview and the usability test helped us to understand the challenges faced by Experienced and Novice users.
We also used System Usability Score to evaluate the usability of the NYMS website.
Our design strategy focuses on crafting a seamless experience that prioritizes information to learn about fungi and utilize NYMS resources. And craft intuitive interfaces that are visually appealing, and easy to navigate, while ensuring that all users are encouraged to engage with NYMS activities.
Through our user-centric IA design, we aimed to create an intuitive and user-friendly browsing experience. Our goal was to ensure that users could easily navigate the website, locate relevant information, and actively engage with NYMS.
To implement our design strategy we made tweaks to the existing IA and
We did rapid prototype testing of our concepts to understand how well our design solution addresses the challenges faced by our participants.
We reevaluated the System Usability Score to understand the effectiveness of our new design
NYMS wanted to focus on growth and encourage participation from the members of the society in the activities and events held by the NYMS. To facilitate this I proposed a reward-based membership system.
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 society.
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!”
Client also appreciated our implementation strategy and said
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 the approval from 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!
During the 3 months of rigorous user research, multiple iterations, long hour meetings, and finally project handoff for the development of the website. It is vital to keep the communication between the team and stakeholders very clear. We did early communicate the idea about member center design to our stakeholders and had to move the concept to the next build due to the limited resources for developing the website. This insight also gave me the idea to come up with the implementation strategy mentioned above and then collaborate with the team members to come up with a design that fits the implementation strategy. Together, we have unleashed the potential of design excellence, and we are confident that the NYMS website will flourish as a valuable platform that engages and delights its users.
