Pioneer Valley Local First
Site Redesign
This project was part of a two-day hackathon called Hack For Western Mass and involved redesigning the website for a non-profit – Pioneer Valley Local First (PVLF).
I was the designer on the team, and the objective was to radically overhaul the site's visual design to make it more approachable and user-friendly.
PVLF, located in Northampton, MA, is a volunteer-run organization, working since 2001 to encourage people in Western Massachusetts to Think Local First.
The UX Challenge
PVLF had an old and clunky website that needed a facelift in the form of a UX overhaul.
The current site was built using Drupal and was something that was thrown together with some basic knowledge of Drupal but no Design inputs.
The landing page of the site was quite literally a long list of links to other sub-pages.
The challenge was to redesign the website over a weekend and develop as much of it as possible.
The Process
Competitor Benchmarking
What were others doing?
We reviewed other sites with the same theme to see what they were doing, how they were laid out and what they were offering to their users.
This information influenced the way we approached the site redesign.
Information Architecture
Re-organizing Content
One of the main things that made the original site unusable was a long vertical navigation bar with an unorganized list of links. This was the first thing we decided to tackle and move this into a more manageable and user-friendly horizontal navigation bar.
For this, we had to take stock of all the information that was spread across the website and work on consolidating it to figure out what a more condensed menu would look like.
Old Vertical Navigation
Horizontal Navigation Mockup
New Organized Horizontal Navigation
Wireframes
With the information gathered from other "Local First" sites and the reorganized site content, we sat down to create mockups based on the requirements and guidelines finalized earlier in the process.
What I came up with was a simple site design, with a horizontal navigation bar at the top, followed by the rest of the content from the home page, condensed down to fit the new format.
