Changemakers Website
My Role
Design + Project Lead
Led a team of three. My role included design envisioning + strategy, wireframing, stakeholder workshop facilitation, & storytelling.
The Team
1 Design + Project Lead
1 Designer
1 Strategist
The Client
Humanitae Advisors and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Humanitae is the IP steward of the Guide for Post-secondary Changemakers site.
The Challenge
The Guide for Postsecondary Changemakers is a web-based application orienting intermediaries and institutions to tools, methods, and resources available to support the institutional transformation process.
The site was falling short of its potential to be the central destination for the rich set of tools, methods, and resources (“public goods”) developed by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grantees and other stakeholders. In addition, elements of the transformation framework were not expressed on the site, leaving gaps in resources, information, and partnerships currently available for intermediaries and institutions.
The Outcome
A redesign of the Guide for Postsecondary Changemakers, including an updated information architecture and navigation menu, several key concepts of institutional transformation, and references formerly absent to the site.
The final redesign helps to:
Improve awareness of the myriad of public goods available today and in the future.
Provide a more convenient and streamlined way to navigate these public goods as institutions work to improve student outcomes.
Approach
3
4
2
1
Design &
Iterate
Created an information architecture (IA) for what a gateway post-secondary transformation site may look like and translated into low- to-mid-fidelity wireframes to demonstrate the site plan to Program Officers at the Gates Foundation.
Immerse &
Familiarize
Immersed and familiarized ourselves with the essential tools, methods, and resources for Postsecondary Transformation, including mapping of public goods and stakeholders to the overall site narrative.
Refine &
Deliver
Finalized the overall design of the site with slight revisions, moving to high-fidelity, ready-to-build design, working closely with a Humanitae developer to deliver via Figma.
Engage Stakeholders
Engaged Program Officers at Gates and their grantees to identify opportunities to use the site as a gateway resource for connecting intermediaries and institutions to their valuable resources and capacity building support.
Framework for Transformation
Transformation is the realignment of an institution’s structures, culture, and business model to create a student experience that results in dramatic and equitable increases in outcomes and educational value.
Institutions transform by integrating evidence-based practices that create inclusive and coherent learning environments and by leveraging a student-centered mission, catalytic leadership, strategic data use, and strategic finance in a robust continuous improvement process.
A revised website information architecture (IA) included improved user flows, additional pages with new content, and new navigational elements to better orient site users to the transformation framework and its resources.
Building a centralized resource
During our discussions with stakeholders from Humanitae and the Gates Foundation, we noticed a few recurring themes that revealed gaps in alignment and thinking around using the transformation framework as an anchor on the current website. Our team recognized this challenge early on, and we decided that the information they wanted to express on the site did not exist yet. We suggested redesigning the site to help align internal and external stakeholders.
Moreover, many of the internal documents we reviewed were difficult to understand due to theoretical jargon, making them less friendly to potential end-users of the site. We wanted to make sure that the language used on the site was more accessible to audiences to understand the incredible value of postsecondary transformation information, which is based on years of research and grant funding. To achieve this, we collaborated with the client to develop visual assets that could easily break down the transformation framework, definition, and continuous improvement process.
Designing for Complex Information
We created two new pages to address gaps in understanding and alignment with the transformation framework. These pages did not exist on the site before and were originally found in inaccessible PowerPoint presentations or outdated internal files.
One of the new pages, Understanding Transformation - Overview, serves as an anchor for site users to the different components of the transformation framework. These include equitable student success, institutional contextual factors, pathways, solution areas, and operating capacities. The page also encourages users to review each component through the lens of their specific institution and its needs.
The other new page is Supporting Your Journey which aims to explain that transformation is most effective when institutions take an integrated approach to continuous improvement. This is done through a cycle of reflection, action, and measurement. The page also provides activities and resources to help institutions reach transformational maturity through iteration and the development of routines.
Introducing Changemakers 2.0
