YUsnow

YUsnow is York Universities snowsports society and is one of the biggest and most successful clubs on campus.  I had the task of redesigning their brand by the development of a website to help them promote the club and provide information regarding what they offer students - i.e, socials, trips and training for current and prospective students.

The Problem:

Let’s say that you are a first year student at the University of York (lucky you), you want to try something new and exciting and have decided that Snowsports is the one for you. How can you find out more information about the club and what they offer to members? I guess you could go onto their social media sites like Facebook or Instagram and have a browse or email them. However, there isn’t a lot of information available on there about the activities on offer to students during the year and when they are on.  This problem provided a significant opportunity for us to help users by designing a platform to help provide all the information needed about these events; when they are on, where they are and how much they will cost. This allowed us to be far more transparent with members and prospective members and gave them a greater opportunity to take part in these events. This platform also benefited the club by using it to promote themselves and everything they run during the academic year especially the annual Christmas and Easter trips to the Alps.

Design Toolkit:

Discovery Research:

It was already pretty clear from user feedback that there was a need for the club to have a platform that allows them to promote themselves both socially and competitively as well as the events they offer to students. It also became apparent the importance on targeting and advertising the club to prospective students who haven’t yet arrived at the university to join YUsnow when they eventually come.

We didn’t have much time, so we immediately started talking to other University clubs and societies both at York and around the country to see how they promote their clubs to new members.

• What apps and websites did they use?
• How many members joined in the past year?
• How regularly do they update these sites or apps?

I like to use Trello to organise my research as it makes it easy to share and collaborate with others. The discovery phase really helped us define the needs of the potential users. We also discovered that casual members would prefer to browse the wide range of different events on offer i.e. racing, trips and socials on different pages.

Checking Out The Competiton:

I have always seen a real importance in looking at competitors and learning from their mistakes. There were a bunch of existing Snowsport club websites out there that I had a play with to get some initial ideas. The majority of them were rather basic and were just one page that only had the details of the events on during each semester. We put some of these products in front of some of the club’s members to get their thoughts and feedback and to help validate our assumption that as the single page approach could be an unviable option for us. It goes to show that you don’t even need to create your own prototype to start getting useful feedback from customers.

Ideation:

Now armed with useful insights into members needs and behaviours, I sketched out some initial ideas for what this product might look like. I knew that it primarily needed to cater for current and prospective students wanting to join YUsnow. The secondary users were the clubs committee who would use the website as a way to promote the club and the events they hold.  Most students when they come onto the website will already have an idea on what part of the club, they are more interested in being apart of whether that is joining the race or freestyle team, going on the trip or socials.  I sketched the interface components on paper as it allowed me to quickly come up with ideas and change UI components easily. Sketches also helped when having discussions with different users.

How Will It Work?:

After I had validated the basic concept, it was time to see if I could actually build this thing. It was critical to get things across as soon as possible to ensure that the design was technically feasible within the time frame. Based on feedback and insights from our target demographic, I decided to create and build a separate page for each thing YUsnow does, such as Race, Trip, Socials, and Freestyle. According to our research, users would primarily visit the website for one specific reason, whether it was to learn more about the trips YUsnow organises to the Alps, or to find out when race training is held during the week. If I decided to go with the singular page approach, users would spend more time trying to find the information they want rather than learning more about the club. I thought this would make life easier for the user and allow us to include as much information as possible on each page, as well as other components, such as videos and images, having separate pages.

Making It Look Pretty:

As I was building the website for students, there was an emphasis on the importance of visual design and ensuring that the pages were aesthetically pleasing whilst still ensuring that the usability of the website was at the forefront of everything I did. Because of the brand guidelines established at the start of the project, I used a bright and inviting tone. As a result, I chose white so that all of the content on the page, including text and images, were clear for the user. I also used dark blue to break up the white and make the brand more youthful and unique, whilst also giving the interface a more playful and vibrant look that contrasted well with other content. For text, black was bought in to ensure reading and contrast, thus reaching appropriate levels of accessibility. Due to the website being aimed at promoting the club, it was vital that we used high quality images throughout, so that we could create a great first impression for the users and this allowed the website to feel more trustworthy than using low quality images whilst also encouraging new members to join the club. I also used videos on the website to allow our users to gain a feel for what the club was about which is hard to do with images alone. We also found that it added a much more personal feel, with users more likely to gain an emotional connection from these videos compared to some of the other content.