Northwest Parkinson's Foundation Redesign
The mission of the Northwest Parkinson’s Foundation (NWPF) is to improve the quality of life for people living with or caring for someone living with Parkinson’s Disease. The foundation had outgrown its website and wanted to bring it up to date.
NWPF came to me with the best kind of problem: they had so much content, they didn't know what to do with it all. I started the project by doing a heuristic evaluation of the site and running a few semi-structured interviews with frequent visitors. I also created a site map to account for all the existing site content. Doing this helped me get a good understanding of the organization and its value to the community, and also helped the NWPF team clean out old and redundant articles so we could start fresh.
Redesigning Site Navigation and Information Architecture
NWPF supports people at all stages of Parkinson's disease, as well as their caregivers. Their site covers everything from nutrition to mental health to NWPF-specific topics like their fund-raising cycling team. I created six categories that would contain all of the content on the site, then used those cateogies to form an intuitive top-level navigation menu. I also added a robust system of sub-menus, so visitors always know where they are and NWPF would have room to grow their content. Last, and probably most critically, I added a search bar, which the site didn't already have.
Redesigning the Home Page
My goal in redesigning the homepage was to give visitors a peek into the site's rich content without overwhelming them. The site originally had two rails, which meant that fully half the homepage was swallowed by peripheral content. I retained only one sidebar from the original two, so that the homepage content would get the attention it deserved.
Donations and community engagement are critical to keeping NWPF up and running, but the donation button and newsletter signup disappeared as soon as you got to The Wellness Center, one of the most active parts of nwpf.org. I added a link to the Donate form to the main menu, so that it would always be available to visitors. I also simplified newsletter signup and gave it top billing on the homepage sidebar.
After they were approved by the NWPF team, I handed off my wireframes to a visual designer for the final look and feel:
