Zgorzała
WCAG-friendly website for the local community
Context
Client: Village Council of Zgorzała
Scope: branding, content direction, UX research, UX/UI design
Desktop prototype
Mobile prototype
Goals & Metrics
The main goal of this project was strengthening residents’ active citizenship by increasing the number of commited residents and increasing the number of individual initiatives and interventions, and – as a result – decreasing the number of inquiries to the Village Council.
Research
As a resident of Zgorzała I got a deeper insight into the local pains. The most valuable data I gathered from the ethnographic research, but to broaden my knowledge I individually interviewed and surveyed residents of Zgorzała. During IDIs I established a few development hypotheses and verified the scale of these phenomena via the online survey. This allowed me to structure features that should be implemented in this project.
The target group is divided into two categories of users: Young Newcomers and Mature Settlers. The Newcomers are mostly highly educated young parents who either spend most of their time on-site or travel to the office daily. The Settlers live in Zgorzała for 10 years and longer and are well-oriented in the local conditions. Both groups share frustration about the commune’s neglections of this area.
Given the convergence of local sentiments I created a common empathy map for the analysed personas.
Branding
Prior to the website design I worked on the community branding to set the style of the whole project. Zgorzała is a conglomerate of features difficult to reconcile. It is a typical suburb with a high density built environment set in the field landscape. The biggest advantage is the human capital. The sigh should reflect multidimensionality of the place, leave a space for interpretation and variety of uses.
Visual system
& principles
The visual system introduces intensive colors associating with freshness and play. To make sure that the design will meet accessibility standards I chose them with the contrast restrictions in mind. The site is based on 12-column grid (desktop) and 2-column grid (mobile) combined with 8-point grid for elements distribution. To view the full development feel free to explore the source file in Figma.
Prototype in Figma
Conversion
Before structuring the site map I gathered all the insights and determined user flows supporting desired conversion:
Information
architecture
The Village Council
I structured the interface according to the aforementioned converion flows. In the Flow 1 the user can access information about the Village Council from the landing page. The Council subpage has easily accessible CTA leading to the contact form.
Tracking local initiatives
Recently updated local projects are presented on the landing’s map section from which the user can either access it’s details and other projects. Each project is presented on a timeline to keep a clear chronology.
For residents
The residents’ knowledge base gathers categorized solutions to frequently searched local issues.
Revisiting project goals
To measure project success I proposed three basic metrics:
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Adoption & Engagement – using the site as a single source of truth for the local matters results in bringing new users to the site and keeping them
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Retention – the users actively seeking for updates on projects of their interest frequently return to the page to check the projects’ status.
