Chronic Kidney Disease Initiative Web Redesign

Project Overview

The Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) Initiative was established to raise awareness and provide comprehensive public health strategies for promoting kidney health. The site was also created to serve as a repository of the work that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had accomplished over the years.

The existing CKD site was nested within a larger parent site for Diabetes, which was also being redesigned. The product owners wanted to elevate the site with the intention of providing more efficient access to key information.

Project Goals

After a successful kickoff meeting with key stakeholders to discuss project scope and requirements, it was clear that time constraints and budget were a concern. My goal was to mitigate these concerns while also ensuring that the work was still centered around the users. The project goals for the redesign were to:

Optimize the site's structure
Improve its connection to the corresponding surveillance system
Refresh the layout and design to meet new CDC web template standards

The CKD project was a "quick and dirty" design refresh, using an audience needs analysis (metrics) and heuristic evaluation to inform the new site structure and design.

My Role

This project was largely focused on analysis and design. I was the sole UX designer (and project manager) on a team comprised of a developer and the product owners—the Division of Diabetes Translation. I was responsible for planning the overall design and direction of the project.

My User-Centered Design Process

The strategy was to provide discounted, fast, and early focus on usability, while prioritizing business goals.

Audience Needs Analysis

As a prerequisite to performing the heuristic evaluation, I pulled metrics reports on the current Chronic Kidney Disease pages to gain insights about site traffic and performance. I frequently used this method on other projects to find friction points, key pages, and to develop usability goals for top tasks.

Key Performance Metrics

File Downloads

Findings

While reviewing the site metrics, I found inaccuracies in reporting that were linked to browser titles, file naming, and coding issues. This highlighted the need to review basic search engine optimization (SEO) practices going forward; ensuring all CKD pages had distinct titles, used consistent file naming conventions, and valid metrics code across the site.

After a review of the file downloads, I also discovered the site had very few HTML pages with much of the content provided to users as downloadable files (PDFs). In keeping with the agency's efforts to provide content as HTML instead of PDFs, when appropriate, I provided recommendations on specific files that would be better served to users as HTML. This added to plans for improving SEO and the business goal of providing more efficient access to key information.

Heuristic Evaluation

Following Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design, I performed a heuristic evaluation of the CKD site—assessing the design not only for compliance with heuristics, but also against other known usability guidelines, principles of usability-related fields (cognitive psychology and human-computer interaction), and my expertise and past experience with CDC web standards and practices.

Findings and Recommendations

Replace flex slider (carousel) with single feature

I recommended that the flex slider be removed and replaced with a single feature:

Helps site appear refreshed more often as the image is updated
Unlike the flex slider that hides content, a single feature graphic helps highlight information

Swapping the flex slider for a feature image also puts less strain on the division to keep this section "fresh". The feature item could be updated more frequently to reflect events/issues that arise around kidney disease or an "evergreen" image (displaying content that is continually relevant and stays "fresh" for readers) could be used when there aren't any current events/issues to highlight.

Revise navigation

Remove "Get Tested for Chronic Kidney Disease" and "Chronic Kidney Disease Data and Statistics" links from the left nav. Items that link outside the site should not be placed in the main navigation.

Reduce information (and link) overload

While a featured resource section provides a quick overview of relevant content, pairing it so closely to another module filled with links presents a bit of information overload, which could potentially undermine the goals for these sections.

Content and Information Architecture (IA)

I created a content inventory and confirmed the final content with the product owners to create a draft IA informed by keyword searches and other data from the audience needs analysis. To wrap up this phase, I conducted a working session with the product owners to review recommendations for which PDFs to transition to HTML, and to finalize the IA.

Design

I used Axure RP to create a click-through prototype of the proposed redesign to not only help the product owners visualize key design changes, but also to present the new flow of information across pages in the site. Working closely with the product owners and developer, we completed a few iterations of the layout and design.

Final Prototype – Homepage Design

The final prototype included all feedback as well as recommendations from the audience needs analysis and heuristic evaluation:

Single feature the can draw users in to the most timely information about the disease
4 key pages that represent the information users seek most (based on metrics) using terms they use
Prominent section to showcase and cross-link to the surveillance project
A section to highlight articles, podcasts, and other useful resources

Development

After receiving final approval from the product owners, I completed the final design specs, content docs, and images for handoff to the developer. Once the site was ready on the development server, I completed a final UX review to ensure everything aligned with the final specs and were in compliance with CDC web standards.

This is a condensed recap of this study. If you are interested in learning more about the full scope of my process, please let me know.