“There is a racist history that surrounds swimming, stemming back to segregation, when Black people were not allowed to access swimming pools.In many ways, swimming, as a sport, feels like it wasn’t made for us.”
SWEMKIDS.©
SwemKids is a nonprofit school-based program that teaches children introductory swimming lessons and water safety skills as a part of their school's curriculum, in the form of scholarship lessons. This model ensures that children are exposed to the water early and gain important life-saving skills to make sure they are safe while having fun!
MY ROLE
UX Product Designer + Researcher
Collaborate with Ashley Acevedo and Patia Borja
TIMELINE
3 Weeks
TOOLS
Figma, Miro, Google Suite, Optimal Sort, Whimsical
METHODOLOGIES
Surveys, Interviews, Affinity Mapping, Journey Mapping, Competitive and Comparative Analysis, Persona Development, Sketching, Card Sorting, Site Map Design, User Flows, Wireframing, Usability Testing, Iterative Prototyping, Visual Design.
THE MISSION.
SWIMMING IS LIBERATION.
The mission of SwemKids, is to eliminate all of the barriers that prevent Black children and their families from being safe in and around the water, and with each lesson, they are confident that they are changing the picture of drownings within the Black community.
Research indicates that there are 3 components to why Black people are not well versed in swim education are:
Access to Water
Cost of Lessons
Hair Maintenance
It’s time to change that and bridge the gaps.
THE PROBLEM.
GETTING THE STORY TO THE SURFACE.
Our client needs to solidify her mission and story so that she can reach her audience across all the legs of her businesses with consistent language and goals. She has an incredible mission but we need to make that clear to everyone else that interacts with her products and services so that they can better understand the importance of her work and mission.
THE FULL SCOPE.
BUILDING BRAND AWARENESS AND ASSOCIATION.
Trish Miller is a vibrant woman with a true passion for serving people’s vulnerabilities with water and giving the freedom of swimming to all. She is the founder and CEO of 4 companies centered around these core beliefs.
Swem Kids - Non-Profit Swim School
Atlanta Swim School- For-profit organization providing private and group water safety and swimming instructions to adults and children.
SwemWear Gear - Athleisure apparel for the SwemKids community
Ane Swimwear - Athletic swimwear brand that removes the obstacles to swimming proficiency for all with a patent-pending fully waterproof swimming cap that keeps thick and curly hair dry & provides protection while enjoying the water.
Focusing our energy on optimizing the SwemKids experience and showcasing that story would bring the most value to our client and create a springboard for future redesigns of her other organizations that will have a major impact in her community and beyond. We wanted the community to learn to associate Swemkids and its sister organizations, while also differentiating them. So we implemented quick links as a type of master navigation at the top of the site.
OUR CLIENT.
Shifting History, Paving a New Future.
Trish P. Miller, MBA, MPH
“The life-saving skill of swimming has skipped decades of Black families, largely because Jim Crow and segregation laws denied many Blacks access to swimming pools.”
Trish Miller is a public health professional who is committed to educating marginalized communities on swim education: a survival skill, but also a recreational activity that every child deserves to have access to.
UNDERSTANDING OUR AUDIENCE.
BLACK PARENTS, GUARDIANS, SIBLINGS, AND CARETAKERS.
Showcasing the value of swimming was important to our client not only to encourage our target audience of black parents and caretakers to seek swim lessons for their children but also for persuading school administrators and potential donors that SwemKids is vital to the community.
Users expressed that swimming is a survival skill, but also a great tool for healing and finding peace. Knowing how to swim can also open up more opportunities for children beyond recreational.
“The CDC reports that Black children 5-19 years are 5.5 times more likely to drown in a swimming pool than their white peers.”
To begin our research, we surveyed users to gain insight on their personal relationship to swimming, which is a generational skill. Our initial research, showed that while 52.4% of people perceived their children could swim, in further interviewing we found that the level of swimming was not to the standard that could protect them in life-threatening situations, and their abilities were often constrained to water and experiences they had been exposed to. This further confirmed the importance of educating our users on how vital swim education is.
EMERGED THEMES.
Access to water
Safety of their children
Relationship to water
Children’s needs & wants
“Because most of the people in my parents’ generation don’t know how to swim due to history, I want to learn as a form of liberation.”
EMPATHIZING WITH OUR USERS.
MEET NAOMI!
Our Usability Testing showed that the overall mission and actual heart of the SwemKids is getting completely lost to users. Some key takeaways we found:
Craved transparency! Wanted to know more about the program, curriculum and instructors.
Confusing navigation, and lack of clarity.
Unaware it was a non-profit, unclear on pricing.
Generally enjoyed the friendly feeling of the site.
The bounce rate: 95%!
FEATURE PRIORITIZATION.
BUILDING TRUST.
Our users were asking for more thorough information so reiterating that trust and care of children throughout the site was really important to reassure parents their children are in good hands, and our client wanted her story told more explicitly. The navigation needed to reflect these needs and goals in order for the user to best understand where and what to click.
WE ASKED HOW MIGHT WE?
Make Naomi and her children feel comfortable to learn and have key figures that represent their community in any extracurriculars?
Ensure that Naomi is receiving transparent and accurate information regarding her children’s care?
Show that swimming is valuable?
THE SOLUTION.
STORYTELLING THROUGH NAVIGATION.
Telling the story and mission of SwemKids was the top priority. With that in mind, it was really important to build out a proper About section as well as highlighting representation in water and the real experiences of people in the Swem community. Building more robust curriculum and instructor pages would also be vital in building credibility and trust in the program. We wanted to create a site that was warm and friendly but also remained clean and intuitive for users looking for information.
“I am an anal parent so the details there were really important to me, everything that was there gave me the confidence I want to book a session. I like how uniform everything is”
MEASURING SUCCESS.
ACCESSING FREEDOM THROUGH SWIMMING.
Decrease the bounce rate to the 40-50% range, down from the current 95% by EOY.
Increase the traffic of organizational sign up by 50% by EOY.
Create more awareness of SwemKid’s mission and goals in the community, as well as introduce sister organizations.
Build stronger relationships with donors and partners.
Decrease drownings and give black children access to leisure and the freedom of swimming!
DIG DEEPER INTO MY PROCESS
>DISCOVER - Research & Understanding Context.
BEYOND SURVEYS AND INTERVIEWS.
To better understand our client and users we spent significant time researching and understanding the problem from societal and cultural contexts. Below are some of the resources that informed us.
Why child drownings are a public health issue & what we can do about it | Trish Miller | TEDxAtlanta
Racism at American Pools Isn’t New: A Look at a Long History
NPR: Remembering A Civil Rights Swim-In: 'It Was A Milestone'
CURRENT SITE.
The current navigation has a majority of the navigation tabs routing to the main page in a type of one page website, this really confuses users because they tend to scroll on the home page and then click on the navigation but it takes them to what they’ve just scrolled.
The “Book Now” also takes them to a whole different site without prompting - Atlanta Swim School, which further confuses users because they then have to pay for classes and don’t understand how SwemKids is related to it.
Our goal was to make the redesign navigation more intuitive and user friendly so that we could gain strong visitor retention that leads to conversations which can lead to larger community building for SwemKids.
COMPETITIVE & COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS.
From our competitor analysis, we saw potential opportunities to showcase more information about SwemKids that could increase the target audience’s engagement with the site. We looked to other swim schools that were trusted and established such as the YMCA.
For our comparative analysis we looked to companies with more than one company in their portfolio, like Gap INC. where their site has master navigation for multiple brands under the umbrella organization. We also looked to other nonprofit sites such as The Atlanta Women’s Foundation to gain a better understanding of how Non-profits structure and position their mission and goals.
>DEFINE - Synthesizing Research
The main themes that emerged from our interviews and research were access to water, the safety of their children, their relationship to water, and consideration for their children's wants and needs. Through synthesis, we were able to empathize with our audience through our persona, Naomi. To better understand Naomi’s experience with SwemKids, we then created a user journey map that depicts the actions, thoughts, and emotions of Naomi while interacting with the site.
>DESIGN - Intuitive architecture and prioritization
IDEATION & FEATURE PRIORITIZATION.
We performed an ideation session that helped inform us of our potential features. To determine which were of most importance, we divided it into the four quadrants: Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, and Would Like to Have. Considering our clients' needs and the user interview/survey data, we knew that telling Swemkids’s story and providing informative, transparent information was our priority.
CARD SORTING & INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
Once we established our features we conducted a closed card sort to help us build the most natural and intuitive navigation for our users.
>DELIVER - Iterative testing and results
We wanted to create a site that was warm and friendly but also remained clean and intuitive for users looking for information.
USER TESTING
In initial paper prototyping, we really focused on making sure the navigation and homepage were really solid for the user to best understand where and what to click. Early on in testing, we found that “The Swem Team” tended to confuse people into thinking it was a competitive type of swim team instead of the instructors and staff of SwemKids and changed this language to “Meet the Team”
In our Lo-Fi testing, our secondary navigation font was too small to read but our users were able to complete the tasks quickly and easily.
Through Hi-Fi testing, we saw that our users were able to seamlessly navigate the site and felt comfortable with SwenKids. We did have a comment from one user that would like to have more explicit information about the age ranges on the curriculum and more information surrounding how the lessons would adapt for age. Another user enjoyed that “Swem” was clearly defined on the landing page, she said she felt like she was immediately welcomed and this was a website for her!
NEXT STEPS.
Create the rest of the Instructor & Board Member Bio’s
Add press and financials pages
Include explicit age information on the curriculum
Look into creating a type of parent and educator portal for existing members.
Build out client’s other sites for sister organizations.