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SUSSMAN DESIGNS
While on a team of 4 UX Designers, we had the opportunity to work on an online magazine by and for Jewish teenage girls. jGirls Magazine provides any self-identifying Jewish girls between the ages of 13–19 with an outlet that encourages self-expression in a supportive community. Our UX design team was tasked with analyzing the existing website for jGirls Magazine, increasing retention rate and time spent on site, as well as, encouraging girls to engage with the community.
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Our research methodology examined jGirls Magazine from both a non-profit perspective as well as how the Magazine currently exists as a digital product. In terms of site-specific research, we conducted user interviews and usability testing of the current website with the site’s primary demographic base. This also was one of our biggest constraints as many girls were away for Summer and we had difficulty finding enough girls for each state of the process that required participants. An acceptable quota we determined was met but in future testing we would require more rigorous planning and resources to discover a wider amount of voices for more accurate testing pools.
INTERVIEWS & PERSONAS
After conducting 8 interviews with teenage girls (some of which were non-Jewish to simply get insights on the sights aesthetics and functionality) we understood how our primary users were interacting with the website and helped us to better identify the needs and main pain points of the user.
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Then we created personas based on the girls’ needs (2 teen editors, 1 adult donor) for the sake of our designs our focus was on the younger first-time writer, Frida)
Then we created personas based on the girls’ needs (2 teen editors, 1 adult donor) for the sake of our designs our focus was on the younger first-time writer, Frida)
USER JOURNEY
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Currently…. jGirls Magazine provides Jewish teenage girls with a platform to express themselves, giving them an opportunity to hone their leadership skills and learn how to voice their differences in a safe and respectful environment.
"How might we encourage a stronger sense of belonging and empowerment for Jewish teenage girls so that they can foster meaningful relationships within the community?"
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Because the website was already user-friendly, we made the executive decision to focus our initial design on building on top of what the site was already doing well in. Thus, we prioritized building an emotional connection as we went forward with design and testing. This meant less of a focus on features, sitemap changes and task/user flow changes and more on delightfulness. Due to the limitations we discovered in our design studio, our first iteration played it safer and would become known as the “Alpha design” on our team later.
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After iterating on the initial design and re-strategizing our approach, we created a prototype that was a was meant to deliver meaningfulness and improve engagement while also enhancing functionality. We conducted our next round of usability testing on this prototype, the first version of our Final Design.
NEXT STEPS
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We concluded that the final design is the direction that will benefit jGirls Magazine to expand its community and further amplify Jewish teenage girls’ voice, but there is still much to be done.
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Because of time and resource constraints, our team was not able to test with a bigger pool of the desired demographic.
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Because we didn’t find any measurement for success in the “Ask an Expert” section we considered it would be a great opportunity to use that idea and turn it into more of a forum or live chat idea — where girls would be able to start dialogue and conversations in real-time).
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We’d like to make sure these design implementations fit within Wordpress templates and are feasible for moving forward with development.
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