Resistance Mapping
Redesigning a site the provides educators and students resources about housing discrimination across NY state
Team
2 UX designers, 2 Historical researcher, 1 Videographer, 1 PM
Role
UX Designer & Researcher
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 about the effects 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 that are designed to be integrated into a classroom environment, but remains 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 causes to provide digital solutions to problems they were facing. 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 had also received feedback from users that the project volunteers didn't know how to address.
The Solution
Create a new information architecture for the site that allows for easy expansion for project volunteers while remaining intuitive for teachers and students.
Research
To discover what user needs we needed to address, we conducted multiple forms of user research targeting current student/teachers who used the site, as well as potential new users.
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
We used Qualitrics to find how efficiently new users (n=9) could find various resources on the site. We also used exit interviews to capture each user's experience and pain-points.
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 there wasn't a central place they were hosted.
Many users complained about the map not being as interactable as they would have expected. This was especially common amongst students who wanted to overlap different versions of the 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 didn't't have much tech experience, so volunteers hadn't put much thought into it.
Redesign
To start the redesign, our team drew fresh wireframes that could address the user needs we found. We made sure to focus specifically on making the site navigation as clear as possible.
White Board Wireframes
Once we finished our wireframes, we created paper prototypes we could use to test the efficacy of our redesign and conduct A/B testing.
To test how well our ideas for the redesign addressed user needs, and which UI changes were best received, we created a paper prototype to run tests with. Using the prototype, we conducted A/B testing (n=9) to decide what visual direction to go in. We also tested for the time time it took to complete tasks on the different iterations of the paper prototype to find 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. To simplify the process and allow for future expansion, we combined 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 the lesson plans they were looking for. To help both groups, we created a landing page for the curriculum and a standard template that could be used to upload lessons.
Curriculum Landing Page
County Lesson Template
User testing also taught us that students wanted the map to be more interactive and have clearer directions.
Our user testing taught us that users wanted to see multiple map layers at once, and wanted map's interactive location information to be clearer. We also found that a recurring problem for the map was users misidentifying the tool tip menu as a cookies pop-up, so we wanted to make the function of the pop-up clearer.
Original
Updated
reflection