A Project Design Profile
By Tiffany Gray
For my final project, I am doing a website redesign of the Mormon Women Oral History Project website as the current website needs modernizing and updating. The current iteration of the website began as a digital landing place for the project to provide information about Claremont Graduate University’s efforts to gather oral histories from women affiliated with the Mormon experience. What began in 2012 as a graduate class project under the direction of Claudia Bushman on 20th-century Mormon women’s history, the Mormon Women’s Oral History Project has since collected over 290 oral history narratives from Mormon women around the globe, thus resulting in a compiled collection – both hard-copy bound and digitized – of Mormon women experiences. For both the project and the collection, the current Mormon Women’s Oral History Project website serves as the digital location for individuals to gain information about the history of the project, how to become an interviewer for the project and interview individuals to contribute to the collection, and information about how to access the compiled collection of oral histories. Primarily utilized by individuals interested in either contributing to the collection or learning more about the project and the accompanying collection for academic research, the Mormon Women’s Oral History Project website offers users preliminary information about the project and collection to help them understand the project’s purposes and goals and how individuals can help contribute and/or interact with the gathered collection.
Despite a fully functional website for the project and collection, the purpose of my redesign of the Mormon Women’s Oral History Project website are two fold:
- The current website needs an update to increase user experience satisfaction (and, potentially increase users of the site generally)
- My own personal goals of contributing towards the collection as part of my dissertation research towards my PhD.
With these considerations in mind, I offer a brief analysis of the current website layout and several of the issues I see as impeding the success of the website in terms of user experience, followed by a brief explanation about how and why this collection contributes toward my PhD research.
Brief Analysis of Current Website Iteration
While the current website is functional and meets the primary objectives of the website’s purpose, the website design is dated and lacks in dynamic organization patterns and structures that help to make a website user friendly and engaging. As the image below demonstrates, the color palate and boxed organization of the current homepage creates a sense of confinement within the frame of the screen. Likewise, the site itself employs at least 4 different typographies in different fonts that struggle to unify the sites typography hierarchy. The spacing of material within the grid pattern is also lacking, where some of the modules do not align, thus creating a lack of symmetry, and the padding between grid modules is not equal, which creates an imbalance in organizational structure. And, while the navigation bar is well done, it is the primary object (and not the name of the site) that most users will spot first, as it is the highest point on the page that is also the most furthest left aligned element.
From the homepage, I move to ‘FAQ’ tab and accompanying page on the website, to demonstrate a second issue that the current website struggles with regarding formatting and dynamic organization. On the ‘FAQ’ page pictured below, the list of Frequently Asked Questions are all open with the answers provided underneath the tab. While not a dynamic way to organize the material, it does have all the information there. However, for a user, the engagement with the page is very text heavy and off balanced because the length of questions in relationship to the images to offset the text does not align. The image below doesn’t show all of the questions as more questions extend beyond where the image shown finishes. A better design for this page would be to create a drop-down for each question that closes when another question is clicked, helping to tighten up alignment and give greater structure and organization to the page.
PhD Goals
My second reason for wanting to update the website coalesce with my PhD goals of completing a digital finding for the collection as part of my dissertation project. Bringing forward the voices of Mormon women, particularly Mormon women from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints tradition, as examples of religious women’s rhetorical practices is a primary research objective. The Mormon Women’s Oral History Collection offers richness and depth to the Mormon woman experience and provides primary source material of the Mormon woman experience within their faith. As a Latter-day Saint Mormon myself, I’ve found that women of this faith have suffered marginalization in academic studies about women’s rhetoric, often due to the church’s early practices of polygamy. Therefore, I want to promote and work on any projects that increase Mormon women’s presence in studies about women and/or religious women’s rhetoric, as their voices have struggled to gain footing in broader academic conversations.
As outlined on my User Experience Blog Post for Dr. Pullman’s User Experience 8122 course, searching the digital location of the Mormon Women’s Oral History Collection is challenging, due to organization of the collection itself and the way the library system at Claremont Graduate University organizes the material. (By the way, this is a system issue, not a library issue. The system limits how things are input into the catalogue, therefore limiting available search options for navigating the collection). To read more about my UX case study on this, click HERE.
Redesign Plan
My website redesign plan includes updating the website to a more modern and engage website style that utilizes whitespace and content spacing in more dynamic ways. Likewise, I plan to include fewer elements of text heavy pages, and instead rely on hidden features that activate with clicked or hovered over.
From the navigation bar, I plan to redesign the following pages:
- Homepage
- How it Started (aka About Us)
- About the Collection
- Join the Project
- DONATE
From the page links, I plan to offer increased design pages that include:
- MWOHC Publications – a page that explores how the collection has been used in scholarship
- Support the Collection – a page that provides unique explanations of ways to support the collection
I do not plan to redesign the Search the Collection finding aid page yet as this is my dissertation project goal. However, I plan to link the button on the page to the current library website page to at least be able to access the collection.
Most of my redesign focuses on updating the website to a more modern layout, one that employs unique grid-based formatting. I plan to use Canva’s website builder as my primary source of designing. Their platform for web design offers many template examples and patterns to use, although I think, for the most part, I will use the templates as ‘guides’ instead of as the framework of the website. Canva’s website builder also offers responsive web design guidance to help ensure that the website design utilized transitions smoothly from one screen type to another. Therefore, most of my website redesign will be built from Canva’s existing platform, with little coding involved on my part.
In terms of completing the project, I don’t really have any concerns. I feel passionate about this project, and therefore, highly motivated to complete it. Once completed, I plan to share the final result with Caroline Kline, Director of the Mormon Women’s Oral History Project at Claremont Graduate University, as I have met with her in person and discussed the collection and my desired project with her at length. I’m hoping this website redesign will help support both her and my desire for the collection to gain greater traction in academic research and increase its user footprint by those wanting to learn more about the 20th and 21st Mormon woman experience.