Project Lela
Inspiring users to join a
new movement
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01 Overview
Type
UX Research
Content Strategy
UX Design
Visual Design
Duration
Team
Kristen, Lead UX Researcher, Content Designer, UX Designer
Patrick, UX Designer, UX Researcher
Sophia, UX Designer, UX Researcher
Martha, UX/Visual Designer
5 months
Project Lela Founder
Stakeholder
02 Background
The Organization
Project Lela is a 501(c)3 non-profit that provides affordable and timely legal advice for navigating workplace issues. At the time of this project, the organization was in the concept and research phase and wanted to increase its discovery through a marketing website and a community of allies.
The Problem
Employees experiencing workplace conflict, like harassment or discrimination, need timely advice and resources to navigate, resolve, and prevent these issues. Attorneys and legal experts need a way to source and manage pro bono clients that fit their interests and requirements.
The Hypothesis
A marketing website that generates interest in Project Lela's services from employees and legal experts by providing targeted content and information about how the organization can help them.
High-level Goals
Discover
Identify and understand key target audiences
Engage
Enable Project Lela discovery
Launch
Create marketing website to capture user interest
03 Research
The Problem Space
By the start of the project, Project Lela's founder had conducted basic, exploratory research into the organization's key target audiences:
Individuals experiencing common workplace issues
Attorneys and legal experts searching for pro bono clients
As the UX Research Lead, I intended to conduct in-depth interviews with both target audiences, but due to the sensitive nature of our topics (which centered around legal issues in the workplace), it was difficult for our team to source participants. To adhere to the project timeline, I decided that we should create extensive surveys for each audience to help us understand the problem space and shape Project Lela's products.
Based on secondary research into employees' experiences with workplace issues and attorneys' experiences with sourcing and managing pro bono cases, we created hypothesized journey maps for each audience. These maps helped us explore and ideate on Project Lela's future product.
Storyboard
To gain a deeper understanding of what individuals feel and do when faced with issues in the workplace, my teammate created a storyboard that detailed a common "issue cycle" related to workplace conflict. In this cycle, when someone experiences discrimination or harassment, they often fear retaliation or feel trapped in their workplace, with no choice but to seek a new job to escape the issue.
This storyboard helped me realize that the content strategy for the website would need to focus on information and resources that empower individuals to break the cycle and seek help to navigate and resolve these issues.
04 Content Strategy
SEO
Since one of the main goals of this project was to engage potential customers and capture user interest in Project Lela, I knew that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) would be critical for my content strategy. I used Google Trends to analyze the key search words and phrases that our target audiences use when looking for information related to legal advice and pro bono cases.
From this research, I gained a deeper understanding of the language that both audiences use and the tone that would most resonate with each. I learned that individuals feel desperate, frustrated, and sad when searching for legal help and that legal providers use professional, serious, and practical language when searching for pro bono resources.
SEO Analysis
Voice and Tone
I developed an in-depth voice and tone guide to help me craft a branding strategy to engage with these audiences and create market awareness for Project Lela. For both employees and legal experts, our tone would need to be serious and respectful, but employees would resonate more with less formal and more inspirational language.
Overall, Project Lela's content language and tone should be:
Motivational
Informative
Clear
Approachable
"At Project Lela, our voice is spirited and fearless, as someone who cares deeply about the transformative work they are doing and the community they are building."
Branding Guidelines
I also created in-depth branding guidelines for our marketing site that defined our audiences and guided the team's content and visual strategy. The guidelines include the reasoning behind our brand adjectives, writing principles, voice and tone, color palette, typography, and imagery to ensure consistent and effective designs. They also serve as a foundational resource that can be adapted once Project Lela defines its product.
I worked with our Visual Designer to define our visual strategy.
05 Wireframes
Competitive Analysis
To gain a better sense of what makes a successful marketing website, we analyzed direct competitor sites (ex: other legal services companies) and indirect competitors that provide online professional services for individuals (ex: mental health and medical services).
We learned that successful marketing sites often use these elements:
A description of how the product or service works
Testimonials from clients
Impact statistics about the problem area or the company's outcomes
Direct competitors
Indirect competitors
Low-Fidelity
We then used Figma to ideate on our wireframes, creating low-fidelity versions of the website. Although we had individually created low-fidelity wires, when we regrouped we realized that we had each conceptualized three key screens: a home page and individual pages for employees and legal providers. We had all created separate employee and legal provider screens because we felt that the messaging and content would be unique for each.
Below are the low-fidelity versions of these screens that I designed.
Home screen
Employees screen
Legal providers screen
Home Screen Ideations
After presenting our key screens to the organization's founder, she encouraged us to focus our efforts on creating a one-page marketing site for our MVP while she worked to further define Project Lela's product. Together, the team combined the information we wanted to provide for employees and legal providers into the home screen. We iterated on several versions of the home screen, playing with the page layout, imagery, and UX writing.
06 UX Writing
Clear and effective UX writing was a key component of crafting a marketing website that provides information and messaging that resonates with our main audiences and motivates them to engage with Project Lela. While we iterated on our home screen, I used our voice and tone guide to develop our body copy. I fine-tuned our messaging until we had a final version that seemed most in-line with our branding and audience interests.
Here are some of the edits I made to the body copy and UX writing.
Impact statistics.
Simplified and clarified the statistic copy to make a more profound and immediate impact
Join the movement.
Fine-tuned the user titles to more closely match our audiences and used more motivational language to encourage engagement
What we do.
Strengthened the body copy to more clearly and effectively showcase how Project Lela can help employees
07 Design
Below is the final design of the MVP marketing website, which supports our high-level goal to engage with individuals and legal providers and enable discovery of Project Lela. This site is currently live at projectlela.org and is gathering voluntary user data that will help shape Project Lela's future products.
Desktop
Mobile
08 Outcomes
Deliverables
Contributed to the discovery of Project Lela's primary audiences through secondary research and developed the branding and writing guidelines for the organization. Designed and prototyped screens for a marketing website to inform and engage future users.
Impact
As Project Lela is still in the concept and research stage, our efforts further defined the organization's key target audiences and laid the foundation for more robust user research in later stages of development. This project was also instrumental in helping to establish Project Lela's mission, language, and brand and enables the founder to capture user interest and data that will help shape the organization's future products, services, and community of users.