In Bloomington, Indiana, Ann Marie is the lactation consultant, well known among the community and care providers who attend to the city’s pregnant women.
As such, her website needs to not only be a platform by which people could hire her, but also one that provides expert and responsible information. Ann Marie wanted people to learn about breastfeeding, tongue ties, and various issues. All of these domains were very familiar to her, but not so her users.
Additionally, Ann Marie is not only a service provider, she is an advocate and activist on these issues and is so committed, she has insisted posting her mobile number online (despite my warnings). As such, I assume her site will grow to include ways one can advocate for the issues important to her.
In working with Ann Marie, we came up with broad categories for navigation that used to draft a basic wireframe. I took this basic model and used it to develop three Axure models.
This is an ongoing project and my current step is to test the models with users in the field. I hope to conduct Concurrent Think Aloud tests with 10 subjects and I want to ensure I get varied group of mothers and expectant mothers. Of particular importance to the tests are women who have a varying degree of knowledge about birth, lactation, and the other domains represent in the site.
In particular, my concern here is jargon as many users might not know what, for example, a tongue tie is. I am also concerned about how Ann Marie has proposed organizing her resources. She has separated out a category of groups that specialize in serving persons of color. I anticipate that some might see this separation as a type of segregation. I am certain user testing will clear up this and other issues.
Eventually, I’ll build this site in WordPress, as Ann Marie will require an approachable UI for which to make updates and changes to her own site. I’ll also use Twitter Bootstrap to ensure the site is mobile-ready. In addition, I’ll draft a user manual, so Ann Marie can become comfortable with the new technology I hope she'll be able to administrate.