Case Study

Website design, user experience review and Tally workflow

The brief

Rachel is a researcher at The University of Gloucestershire and she got in touch to ask if I could help her to develop a Squarespace website. She was struggling with creating forms that would meet the requirements of the ethics board and an accessible, user friendly website design that would attract her target audience.

This is just the sort of problem I like! A bit of brain teasing workflow and a website that needs some design sparkle, and an engaging, keen client!

The task

Once I had explained to Rachel how to add me to the website, I got to work on reviewing the forms and the requirements, and worked on a Sketch wireframe to plot out the workflow and identify problems. This is a great way to spot problems and time efficiently for clients on a strict budget without spending lots of time inside the website platform. It helped Rachel and I to check we were in alignment with our goals.

I made use of Squarespace’s inbuilt form feature for any areas that didn't require the user to make a legal signature, and added PDFs for any reading material that required the user to download them and save.

For forms that required a legal signature to comply with the ethical policies, I tested out Jotform but we realised that this would cap the volume of responses each month which would impact on deadlines. After some research on the best solution, the forms were moved to Tally whose fair use policy met the project needs. The integration with Squarespace was super easy and the form design was very simple to set up.

Rachel created some graphics including the website logo. I advised on best practice for accessibility with text and images. I also updated the website design with clear fonts, consistent imaging and made use of Squarespace’s accordion feature to walk the user through each step before arriving at the important research questionnaire.

Software: Squarespace, Canva, Photoshop, Tally and Sketch.