• Street League
UX Research • Strategy
Contribution
» UX research
» UX design
» Strategy
» Information architecture
Role
Lead Designer
D8
Street League are an incredible charitable organisation with 120 dedicated staff (excluding volunteers) supporting 14 to 30 year olds around the country through award-winning academies, focused on making people more employable. This is done by combining physical activities, whether it's football, gym classes, or dance for example, alongside more classroom focused tasks focused on developing workplace-based skills, such as mock interviews, CV building, and computer literacy.
They had identified their offering that wasn’t effectively portrayed online – people assumed that they were solely a London-based football-only company. Their website is so important in the operational function as a charity, it is where young people are able to sign up, where people are able to donate, where businesses can volunteer, and where staff find employment. I wanted the new site to function properly for every user group, and help contribute to an extremely noble cause.
“Grant, it’s taken nearly 10 years to achieve this dream, you have no idea how happy I am that you have delivered this, its going to transform our culture. Thank you.”
— Dougie Stevenson, Street League CEO
User research
In order to gain a deeper understanding of the experiences of current participants, a few members of the team visited and participated in a couple of day sessions across Greater Glasgow. It's activities like this that really hit home the amazing work the Street League team do, and it was invaluable for understanding the routes people had taken to join programmes, and more importantly how those routes could be improved.
Workshop
Street League’s website is such a key part in their offering — it was imperative that it worked efficiently for all users whether they were looking to join in, donate, or join the team. I was able to gather insight into how we can best serve users by running workshops with staff members at all levels of the business in order to gain a better grasp of how their digital presence could better serve them at an operational level. A simple card sorting exercise with the team allowed us to progress to the goal for the session, which was to put together a simplified sitemap.
Discovery
An accumulation of initial research, validation from the Street League team, immersive visits to active sessions and ultimately the workshop sessions, allowed me to piece together an all encompassing sitemap and overall strategy for directing traffic through the site.
Conversational & real connection
One major concern that became clear was the entry point for people to get started with Street League. I found that the typical web based form was contributing to a high drop-off rate, especially with younger users, sometimes due to lack of digital literacy, but also due to that contact method feeling intimidating or alien. I felt a solution to this was making that first contact possible via Messenger or WhatsApp, as well as including team members names and faces on location pages to have that personable feeling from the outset.
Language as a tool
While a majority of Street League's participants tend to be young people that might need some extra help in taking the next step into higher education or work, that isn't exclusively the user base. People of all ages and situations are welcome to join programmes. As a result, careful choice in cultivating a welcoming and warm tone of voice was essential in ensuring the desired user experience for everyone.
Empowering & inclusive
One major outcome from the user research was the need to simply have their digital presence accurately reflect what they actually offered; so much of the imagery and content used across their website and social channels was that of London-based football matches, when in reality they cover dance, traditional gym classes, athletics, and more all over Britain. The goal was to create an open, inclusive site that accurately portrayed the classes for what they are — for everyone.
