Case Study
As Ohio’s leader in community behavioral health care, OhioGuidestone focuses on the needs of the whole person, empowering them to take steps towards a healthier future and navigate the most difficult times of their lives. We were tasked with defining an overall strategy to elevate the perception and awareness of the organization and the breadth of services they offer and better reach the clients they serve, while completely redesigning and rebuilding their website with future growth of services in mind.
Project won Gold and Top Tactic awards at the 2023 PRSA Cleveland Rocks Awards.
OhioGuidestone * Berea, OH
Design Strategy & UX Lead * Stakeholder Workshops * Discovery Research & Analysis * Information Architecture * Concept Ideation * Wireframing * Mood Boards * Creative Direction * Visual & Interaction Design
Microsoft Teams * Microsoft Powerpoint * Octopus.do * Adobe InDesign * Adobe Photoshop * Sketch * Trello
We started off by conducting workshops with project stakeholders and subject matter experts to gain an understanding of their clients needs and perceptions. We unfortunately did not have access to speak to actual clients but took what we learned in discovery and created some guiding principles around different topics to create alignment amongst the stakeholders and build empathy for their clients.
We then distilled all our findings and notes into clearly defined primary and secondary audiences with overlapping traits between the two. Mothers with difficult life circumstances were our primary client audience, while fathers were a closely related secondary target. We created personas for each of the 3 main target groups highlighting each group’s life circumstances, relevant personal background, motivations and content considerations to address them.
Our research findings were synthesized into the following journey maps for each persona and socialized to the teams and stakeholders. The information we gathered informed and defined both the architecture of the site and the content we created. I facilitated design workshops with our client advocates and stakeholders to define what information each separate audience would need in order to move from awareness, to comparison, through committing to take action and continuing services.
The overall architecture of the site changed several times throughout our early stages as we iterated with the project stakeholders on categorization of services, the connections between services and locations and ensuring a seamless donation experience. Special attention was paid to cross-selling of services that may have less awareness and calls-to-action that reinforce the “starting your journey” or “getting on the right path” concept.
All of our research and discovery work was then crystallized into a visual blueprint in the form of detailed wireframes that were socialized with our project stakeholders to ensure we were accounting for all the business requirements and functional elements. I also facilitated technical workshops with our development team to ensure that we could actually build the functional and interactive components (including an interactive map feature) within our budget and timeline.
We then created mood boards illustrating the proposed color palette and hierarchy, typography and imagery styles for the approval of the project stakeholders to set the tone of voice and establish a general visual style and what to expect for the new website’s visual / UI design. We recommended a casual, handwritten font to lend a personal, friendly touch to testimonials from clients they had helped. We presented imagery samples that depicted real people in real life situations while establishing a healing, optimistic and trusted identity. Two different concepts were presented to the client and they liked them both so we decided to merge the best elements of both together in the design phase.
The finished visual design combined and expanded upon elements of both moodboard concepts while putting the color palette and font choices to full use. Button styles animate from left to right to reinforce the “starting your journey” concept. Multi-level menus are presented in an attractive, easy-to-use way regardless of device. A simple and clean visual design helped this site win Gold and Top Tactic awards at the 2023 PRSA Cleveland Rocks Awards.
