ABOUT

The brief:

TheFutureYou is a programme offering advice and support for young people who are not in employment, education or training.

My task was:
To better engage users, providing a more interactive experience to members and highlighting important site content.
To better incorporate data collection into the website, in order to improve user participation in evaluation (which is critical to the programme’s funding) without adversely affecting the user experience.
To improve features such as user profiles, which had been rushed during the initial build and were underperforming.

As the programme had only recently relaunched, this had to be achieved with minimal redevelopment.

The work:

On the homepage, I introduced a banner area that my colleagues now refer to as ‘the engagement panel’.
When the user is logged in, this area shows a small ‘dashboard’, including quick links to the user profiles and our interactive wellbeing tool (which allows the user to record their mood and build up a picture of their wellbeing over time), as well as a space for a single evaluation question. The questions are displayed on a cycle, allowing us to collect a full set of answers without the user having to fill in a long form in one go.

The engagement panel is now set to be introduced across all BB Group programme websites.

Luckily, the digital team had already begun to work on an ‘activity tracker’ tool to allow users to track their actions (messages sent, wellbeing scores recorded, etc) in a fun, visual way.
This made an obvious addition to the profiles: the activity tracker not only added interest to the profiles themselves, but also created a link between the homepage (where the user can record their mood via the wellbeing tool) and the profile (where the user can look back at their mood records and see how they have progressed via the activity tracker).

Finally, I added a new initial screen to the tabbed profile content, which served two purposes:
Placing the EET status update form in a prominent position. This was the single most important measure for demonstrating the efficacy of the programme to funders, so it was vital to ensure that users report any changes.
Providing an overview of profile tab content, to help new users to see what is there.

Unfortunately, time constraints led to the activity tracker being simplified down from the original plan; though it is still a functional tool and adds a lot of visual interest to the page.