HCC Camp Page

A redesigned digital experience that lets parents enroll their children into camp with confidence

Project Goal

Rebuild the digital experience for Howard County Conservancy Summer Camps

Introduction

The Howard County Conservancy (HCC) is a nonprofit located outside of Baltimore, MD, whose goal is to educate children and adults about the natural world through nature education offerings. These offerings include a variety of programs and camps for elementary and early middle school children held throughout the school year. However, their website was outdated and confusing for users to navigate, and the conservancy was faced with a high call volume from parents curious about these different program offerings.

My goal was to rebuild the digital experience for HCC summer camps. By doing so, I aimed to create a seamless, easy to navigate experience for parents exploring opportunities for their children, while also providing a unified design that was simple and highlighted the strengths of the Conservancy’s camps.

Defining the Problem

Stakeholder Interviews

To better understand my client's goals and aspirations for this project, I conducted stakeholder interviews with HCC staff. Based on these interviews, I learned some key details about the project:

For parents with young childrens and presumably not a lot of time on their hands, making an easily scannable website was my priority.

The takeaway here being not just to make it easier to navigate to these sections, but to implement planned redundancies in these sections to ensure users could find what they needed.

Based on this information, I knew I would need to find a way to make this content both readily accessible, and easily compartmentalized in order to preserve a consistent visual style across the page.

I knew from this I would want to feature as much high quality images taken by volunteers as possible, to be able to capture what made the organization special by the volunteers who loved it.

Heuristic Evaluation

I also conducted a heuristic evaluation of the existing website as part of my initial research. My main goal during this heuristic evaluation was to analyze the information architecture and user flows, to help better understand why users were having trouble locating key information on the website.

From this heuristic evaluation, I categorically examined each element of the site, and recorded any usability flaws I noted, coding them according Jakob Nielsen's principles.

"Belmont and Mount Pleasant Divide is unclear- No system indication of which camp subset I'm viewing (visibility of system status)"

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Excerpt from my notes during Heuristic Evaluation

Understanding the Users

During the next phase of research, I ran some moderated usability testing sessions with 5 mothers of children between the ages of 4 and 10. During these testing sessions, I asked the participants to imagine themselves in representative scenarios I created where they were trying to accomplish some tasks on the existing website.

Participants noted that a major influcene on their decision making process would be how much faith they could put in both the organization and its counselors that their child would be taken care of.

It is common practice for children's camps to require medication forms for things like scheduled medicines and to report allergies. Once a participant had decided to enroll their child, these items wer a high priority for them.

When looking at the exisiting page's method for displaying the different camp sessions they could register for, participants were often left wanted and hoped for a more thourogh description of the week's theme and type of content.

Creating a Unified Design

Camp Homepage -

First Iteration

1. Pared-down, more focused hero page caption helps direct user flow. 

2. Single 'Register Now' CTA helps funnel users down intended path. 

3. Camp locations blocks give a little flavor of what's in store at each location, and make these actions feel distinct and appealing without distracting from the primary 'Register' CTA.

4. Oversized buttons offer planned redundancy with website menu for links that may be helpful to users. 

Camp Homepage -

Final Iteration

1. 'Explore Sessions' works better than 'Explore Camps' because it suggests multiple different opportunities at the same camp, while 'Explore Camps' gives the impression of fewer options.

2. Including a gallery of images taken at the conservancy helps improve the "trust" factor for the site, and gives more opportunities to feature high-quality volunteer photography!

3. These testimonials and the section title help create user trust and allow parents to enroll with confidence.

4. Textured footer removed after testing indicated it was distracting and gave participants the wrong impression of HCC Camps.

Parent Page - First Iteration

1. Clean, simple alignment of frequently needed links.

2. Including a summary of each location meant to help parents differentiate and better choose which location to explore for their child; Later removed after testing revealed that parents were aware of the differences and more frequently made enrollment decisions due to  proximity of a camp location to their home and camp curriculum, not exclusive offerings at a specific location.

3. If parents are coming here to look for documents and policies, it naturally follows this is where many of their questions would materialize, so a contact form was added.

Parent Page - Final Iteration

1. Header section stripped and simplified to focus on the page content.

2. Page navigation simplified to meet user needs.  The 3 by 3 grid format adds visual interest and appeal to what are essentially a collection of links.

3. Adding a "Meet Our Staff" section was based on feedback received from testing that the site was lacking details that would leave parents confident and trusting. putting a name and a face to the staff makes the page feel more personal and increases user trust in the organization; After all, these people will be watching their child for around 30 hours over the course of the week.

Camp Homepage Before & After

Parent Page Before & After

Results

After implementing the redesigned page, HCC has reported a drastic decrease in call frequency from camp parents. They have also seen an 23% increase to their waitlist registration numbers this camp season.

Full Site: 

https://www.howardnature.org/camp/

https://www.howardnature.org/camp/parent-info-center/