One of the great things about working at Public Zone is the opportunity to share knowledge and developments with the rest of the agency every Friday morning. Our ‘Breakfast Sessions’ are our weekly opportunity to learn about new campaigns, ideas and platforms, and hear what the rest of the team is up to.

Vix and I (Martha) recently gave a Breakfast Session about the research, IA and design process behind our new website for The Prostate Cancer Charity: http://www.prostate-cancer.org.uk/

This was one of my first experiences of this kind of extensive research – and I have no doubt that the passion and pride we had for this project came from the initial research we had done, meaning that everything was done with real people in mind – men who had prostate cancer and those around them. This presentation runs through the full process from pitch to final designs, showing how we worked with The Prostate Cancer Charity to go from this….

to this…

And from this…

To this…

The initial brief from the Charity was our starting point….

They also said they wanted the site to help them:
• Be the first point of call for people affected by prostate cancer seeking information and support
• Raise awareness
• Be an authority on prostate cancer
• Bring supporters closer to their work
• Make the case for why people should support them, by better cross-promoting their activities

We pitched, and got some of it right….. We immediately believed that the website should be built on its information and should be the destination for people affected by prostate cancer. We understood that the site also needed to work hard to persuade users to get involved with the Charity in other ways.

What we didn’t have right was the look – which was too dark, too male, too corporate. That said, there are still elements of the pitch designs on the site today – the ‘script’ tips to bring out the voice of the Charity, the carousel of popular pieces of information.

We also pitched the idea of a splash page that displayed when you first came to the site with a simple awareness message like ‘Men over 50 should do to the doctor every two years’. As we got to know the user group we realised just how incorrect it was to display this message to all users, particularly those who were looking for information and support following a diagnosis – and how the site had to balance a sensitive line between awareness, Charity promotion, support and information.

The Prostate Cancer Charity chose to appoint us because they believed in us and our process… but they did explain where we had got it wrong!

Our starting point was some ‘hardcore’ research, involving a whole load of Public Zoners. It was broken into desktop research, client research and user research.

As part of our desktop research we studied:
- The current site and its analytics
- Competitor sites
- The Prostate Cancer Charity message board and activity
- A web survey that the Charity had already carried out

Spending time on the message board and the site analytics helped us to understand the points at which people were calling for help, and what they were looking for. It also showed us that the message board and the Information pages were by far the most popular, although this was not necessarily the impression the homepage gave, with its busy promotions.

We explored the business goals of the new website in a workshop with representatives from across different departments of the Charity, which we could then play against what we knew from the user research. We also carried out some design exercises with the client to better understand the direction of the design that they had in mind.

However, by far the most extensive section of research, and the one that had the greatest impact on my understanding of the project, was the user research. For this we carried out a range of in-depth interviews, by telephone or in-person. We interviewed men affected by prostate cancer, friends and family, health professionals and men in the target group without previous experience of prostate problems. We also held an interview session with the Charity helpline nurses.

The in-depth interviews covered a range of topics:

Computer literacy
This helped us to understand how, where and when they would be using the site. This included home computer set up, frequency of Internet user, what they use it for.

About prostate cancer
This gave us the greatest and most useful insight, talking to the full range of users about their experiences of prostate cancer and how they find information about it, including their use of other similar sites.

The current site
We talked to the users about when they first used the site and how they found it, how much they used it now, and their thoughts about it.

With some highlighter pens, some post-it notes and some ‘brain’ time we pulled out quotes and insights from across the interviews and categorised them into themes to help us to draw conclusions about the different user groups. This process also showed us what a task we had ahead of us in trying to respond to the full range of users- from the man who told us ‘The blue of the site is just awful’ to the user who said ‘I like the blue colour. I wouldn’t change it’. We understood that for some men the site needed to reinforce the positive stories – that prostate cancer is slow growing and that a diagnosis does not necessarily mean doom and gloom. But for others the cancer was not so much of a problem as living with the treatment and its effects. For some the lighter side of prostate cancer seemed insensitive if they were affected by a serious case of the disease.

The following slides show some of the key findings we pulled out from this process.

These findings then led us onto the next stage of the project which was Vix’s turf of Information Architecture. We used the stories and priorities we uncovered in interviews to inform a series of user personas; fact sheets about a fictional person in a specific audience group. Imagining those user’s journeys through a site, we could begin to structure the site’s information in a way that best married user needs with those of The Prostate Cancer Charity.

With Vix and myself being involved in the project from the start it was a lot easier for Vix when she was able to move to design stage, as ideas had been gestating throughout. Having a specific set of criteria helped us to re-evaluate our work and ensure we weren’t forgetting the project’s objectives.

This presentation is obviously quite a whistle-stop tour of a journey that took quite a few months but it hopefully shows that the research was the foundations on which we built the entire project, and that there were key findings which informed the final site, for example pulling out content that feels human and helping users to navigate treatment choices (which we’ve pulled out on the slides below).

We’re really pleased with the end result, and are delighted to still be working with The Prostate Cancer Charity to keep developing the site and their digital strategy.

So take a look at http://www.prostate-cancer.org.uk/ and let us know what you think…