Hawaii Democrats
Sector
Political, State Party
Challenge
The client needed a refresh to their website that improved its usability and instated their new brand.
Duration
5 Weeks
Role
Full Stack Designer
Research
For this project, I started the research process by looking at the current website that the Hawaii Democrats had and comparing it to other state party sites. I found differences in structure, functionality, and information sorting, where the current site was lacking. I also performed a heuristic evaluation in which I found several issues up to a 4 on Neilsen’s severity scale, with errors like missing links and broken pages that had no error recovery. With all of this information collected, I was ready to start designing the new version of the site.
Ideation
I began to plan out the navigation and page structures across the site using the information I collected in the research phase. From this I was able to create a comprehensive wireframe and prototype structure for the client.
When translating the prototype into high fidelity with the client’s new brand, our design team had to be cautious of imagery and assets used so as to be respectful of users in our native demographic group. This led to a few rounds of design collaboration to get client approval. The rest of the design team and I worked in conjunction with the client to formulate imagery and branding for the site that conveyed hawaii while avoiding feeling touristy or using any imagery of places or things that are sacred or sensitive to the native population.
Design
Once the prototypes were approved by the client, it was time to begin building the website. The website is hosted on Wix, so to roll out the project in one fell swoop I created pages with the new design privately on the back end of the site.
With the pages created, we sent the content to the party for final approval, then prepped for launch. When launching a website like this, I standardly wait until a time with the least amount of web traffic, then push the pages with new URLs and simultaneously draft the old pages and set redirects for any old URLs. We then set up SEO for all pages, and handed off the new and improved site to the client.
Result
This project was my first experience fully redesigning a website as large as a State Party, and as expected I learned a lot. The client was very pleasant and easy to work with, and provided a great space for me to grasp each step of the process for full-stack web design.
I would say my largest takeaway from this project was that even though a design that I create may be perfect in my eyes for functionality and UX design, it does not mean that it is the only correct or valid solution. A lot of this process included me working through several different ideas and ways to design a page until I could find one that worked for both the user and the needs/request of the client.
This experience greatly prepared me for my future work in full-stack design, including working on the rebrand of the Tennessee Democrats website. After completing this project, I feel immensely more prepared to carry out redesigns of websites in the future, and more adept at ideating several successful designs before choosing a final option.
