Resistance Mapping
Redesigning a site the provides students and educators resources about housing discrimination across NY state
Timeline
September 2024 - May 2025
Tools
Figma, Qualtrics, Adobe Suite
Awards
2025 Digital Media Studies Community Engagement Award
Overview
The Impact
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6
1m 27s
Introduction
Resistance Mapping is a Rochester based non-profit that Provides K-12 educational resources to teach the history and impact of housing discrimination.
Resistance Mapping is a volunteer run organization that aims to teach users about the impact of housing discrimination across Rochester. Through their interactive map, lesson plans, and documentary, Resistance Mapping provides free resources designed to be integrated into a classroom environment, while remaining accessible to everyone.
My team partnered with Resistance Mapping for our our Digital Media Studies Senior Capstone Project.
This was my graduating Capstone Project from the University of Rochester Digital Media Studies department. For the year long project, students formed small teams and partnered with local organizations to provide digital solutions to their problems. Our team worked closely with Resistance Mapping in an effort to redesign their site.
The Problem
Resistance Mapping's site was focused entirely on Rochester and lacked the infrastructure to expand across New York State as they originally envisioned. The site also received user feedback that the project volunteers were unable to address.
The Solution
Create new Information Architecture for the site that allows easy expansion for project volunteers while remaining intuitive for teachers and students.
Research
Stakeholder Interviews
We interviewed the Resistance Mapping volunteers to learn how they envisioned the site working and expanding. We also spoke with local teachers who used Resistance Mapping in their classrooms to understand which tools they used and how students interacted with the site.
Contextual Inquiries
Early in our research process, we sat in on a class at James Monroe High School that was using Resistance Mapping's lesson plans. In watching the class, we found that students primarily used the map on the site, but were confused about how it functioned, while teachers mainly used the lessons plans but struggled to navigate the site or help students with specific issues.
Tree Testing
Synthesizing our Findings
Using the data we collected, our group created an Affinity Map to track trends in users' pain points.
Affinity Map
Key Insights
In looking at our Affinity Map, we found recurring themes across different types of users.
Users struggled with navigating the site due to its inconsistent layout and naming conventions. It was especially challenging for educators/new users who were looking to find specific lesson plans, as they lacked a dedicated landing page.
Many users complained about the map not being as interactable as they would have expected. This was especially common among students who wanted to overlap different historic maps.
A pain point brought up by the Resistance Mapping team was the lack of consistency in how new content was added to the site. The team wasn't tech savvy, so little thought had been put into content presentation.
Redesign
To start the redesign, our team drew fresh wireframes that could address user needs. We focused specifically on making the site navigation as intuitive as possible.
White Board Wireframes
Upon finalizing the wireframes, we created paper prototypes to conduct A/B testing and determine the efficacy of our redesigns.
To test how well our wireframes addressed user needs and which UI changes were best received, we created paper prototypes for testing. Using the prototypes, we conducted A/B testing (n=9) to decide the visual direction. We tested the time time it took to complete tasks on the different iterations of the paper prototype to determine which combination was the quickest for users to navigate.
Paper Prototype
Prototyping
When working on our high fidelity prototype, our main focus was on streamlining navigation across the site.
One consistent piece of feedback was that finding specific lessons through the Nav Bar was too challenging. We simplified this by combining all lesson plans under a single drop down and created a mega menu to reduce clutter.
Original
Updated
To address further concerns about finding lesson plans through the Nav Bar, we created a Curriculum Page that could host educational content.
We learned from the Resistance Mapping team that the curriculum was added without a standard template, and teachers using the site expressed difficulty finding lesson plans. To help both groups, we created a landing page for the curriculum and a standard template that could be used to upload new lessons.
Curriculum Landing Page
County Lesson Template
User testing revealed that students wanted the map to be more interactive with clearer directions.
User testing taught us that users wanted to see multiple map layers at once, and wanted maps' interactive location information to be clearer. To address the recurring problem of users confusing the tool-tips with cookie pop-ups, we redesigned the tool-tips to be visually distinct and provide clearer directions.
Original
Updated
reflection