The Problem - Inconsistency
CU Boulder's Digital Legacy Clinic's knowledge base was hard to navigate, had inconsistent content, and created confusion for new members of the clinic at the beginning of each semester.
My Role - Standards Development
I took the lead of developing content standards for members of the clinic to follow when working on client facing documents. This took the form as two resource documents with content that was populated as excerpts throughout relevant pages in the clinic's Confluence Space.
Why This Matters - Clinic Image
The clinic should produce a consistent image across all communications with potential, current, and future clients. Because the clinic is student-run, there is a high turnover rate around graduation, and new members should have resources to reduce confusion and maintain that image.
Development - Fieldwork Standards
Fieldwork pages are platform specific pages where clinic members collect all of the information about how a client may interact with that platform when planning their digital legacies or how their loved one may interact with that platform after they pass. These processes are recorded so we can use them to advise clients.
As members of the clinic completed fieldwork pages throughout the semester I noticed that there were inconsistencies in formatting and that much of the language used would be unclear for clients that are less "tech savvy."
Questions and Research
How can we make it clear what actions the user is supposed to take?
How do we communicate warnings?
How do we make the language used accessible?
Much of my research for this focused on creating effective call-to-action and warnings. These are the key statistics and research:
Changing the color of a word or a call-to-action button can increase conversions up to 21%. (source)
Researchers Kuniecki, Pilarczyck, and Wichary found that red prompts strong warning signals and can even increase our mind's reaction time, carrying strong emotional charges. (source)
After some outside research, I took a look at the fieldwork pages that had already been completed over the course of the semester and highlighted some key friction points:
Information was simply copy and pasted from platform help centers
Instructions were in paragraph format
Language was easy for people with more technical capabilities to read, but not for people with less knowledge
Implementation
This research was implemented into a resource document that new and current members of the clinic can reference as they are completing fieldwork pages. It is broken down into 4 sections about the most content heavy potions of the the template: The Feature Overview Table, Detailed Support Documentation Section, the Additional Details Table, and the Change Log.
Each section is broken into two parts: Introduction and Standards
The introduction lets the clinic member know key details for each section:
Audience: Who the clinic member is writing for (clients, clinic members, researchers, etc.)
Summary: A short overview of the purpose of the section.
Notes and Warnings: Specific items about the future uses of the section or important things to know
Standards
The specific standards for clinic content, in order of how they should be approached. Depending on the level of content that needs to be written, some standards may have more detail than others.
Conclusion: Challenges and Scope
Overall, this project taught me and the clinic a lot about the value of having consistent guidlines and structure to follow, especially when you are thrown into the clinc as a new member.
Next semester, I want to do proper user testing and see if the clinics operation's are significantly improved from this semester. This will look like interviews, fieldwork quality checks, and the translation of these pages to client communications.
The biggest challenge of this project was working with a fieldwork template that was constantly updating. This forced me to create generalized standards that would work no matter what format the fieldwork template was.