Project Overview
My Role
Lead UX Researcher
Led UX research efforts, including planning research studies, recruitment, data analysis, and reporting out. Mentored teammates in best practices in UX research including how to create and prioritize research studies, interview facilitation, and triangulating data.
Team
UX designers
Product manager
Product specialist
Digital, executive, and managing directors
Data fellow
Context
8 month long capstone project I worked on with the Death Penalty Information Center (DPI).
Timeline
January 2024 - August 2024
The Problem
The death penalty, as it is currently practiced in the US, is fraught with injustices. DPI is a nonprofit organization that collects all death penalty related data and information to be a neutral, reliable source that people can go to to learn about the injustices. Despite DPI's plethora of information, most people don't engage with it long enough for DPI to have lasting, impactful change on people.
The Methods
My team and I used the educational framework we developed in the first part of this project as a goal to encourage users to engage more deeply with the death penalty issue. We used a combination of content strategy, rapid prototyping, concept testing, and card sorting to do research through design to create a new experience for users, from the wording on the page to the information architecture guiding their journey.
The Solution & Results
Our months of iterations create a new website experience that's more focused on education and on providing information in a way that's approachable for people without much background in the topic. It repackaged the information DPI already has on their website and makes it more personalized to the users, uses more plain language, and has more engaging tools people can use to make the content more accessible to them.
Concept testing results showed that, after participants went through our educational experience made, 63% felt more closely tied to the death penalty, 45% had a stronger stance about the issue, and 85% were able to find the information they were looking for on the website.
This project is under development and is currently projected to launch in late 2025!
For more information about this project, see here:
Our medium articles which document the entire project journey
Our final report detailing our results, process, and reasoning
