Demystifying education advocacy with E3 Alliance
Desktop view of the new E3 Alliance homepage.
E3 Alliance is a well respected education non-profit based out of Central Texas. They came to Pixo for an easier to manage website and design refresh. What we gave them was so much more.
Please note this website is scheduled to launch in June, 2024.
A new kind of discovery research
Our first step in the OOUX sprint was to look at their site and other collateral and forage for nouns. This was our first step in identifying E3’s core “objects”.
Here’s something that might surprise you. Pixo wasn’t E3’s first choice for this website redesign project. They really liked our proposal but ended up going with a cheaper option. Several months later, they returned to us. Their main complaint about the other consultancy was that they tried to build them a cookie cutter website, without really getting to know them.
Introducing OOUX
We took this information as a signal that our typical discovery research phase might not cut it for E3. We decided to employ a relatively new approach called Object Oriented UX, or OOUX for short. This approach required more hands-on time from the client and because I was newer to it, there was a lot of learning on the fly. But it was worth it. Our OOUX sprints included:
Noun foraging throughout their existing website and other strategy collateral
Narrowing down the nouns and establishing which qualified as repeatable objects
Diagraming relationships between objects
Identifying and prioritizing calls to action throughout the system
Developing a navigation that prioritized these objects
All of these tasks involved deep collaboration with the client.
Developing a shared understanding
We quickly learned that the client stakeholders really struggled to articulate what exactly E3 did. We could tell they did a lot, and what they did was important, but we couldn’t figure out what exactly that was. OOUX allowed us to start from the most basic and create the building blocks for a shared understanding of what this organization was, what they do and how they do it. This shared understanding on language and terminology will be longer lasting and more impactful than a new design system or CMS. And the best part is that the nature of the process meant that we were essentially co-designing the website in real time with them.
The old E3 homepage shows a high priority placed on things like resources. We discovered these were actually of very little importance.
We also were able to uncover their real priorities, so they could feel empowered to remove lots of unnecessary content from the website. This was a necessary step to make their work easier to comprehend.
My responsibilities during design and development
After our OOUX sprints, we were ready to build the website. My focus during this stage was on solidifying information architecture, messaging and content modeling. I also advised on content governance for the transition period.
Messaging
An artifact from an audience and messaging workshop
As mentioned before, getting on the same page about language was a big struggle. We were asking them to shift from internal language to plain language, and the nature of what they do made that very difficult. To get there, I had to do a lot of relationship-building, interviewing and workshopping. It was of the utmost importance to bring the right people to the table because buy-in was everything.
Modeling highly structured content
Content modeling is one of my favorite tasks and this one was delightfully challenging. For the new E3 website, we decided to create some highly structured content types. The site has typical interior pages, landing pages and listing pages, but it also has a practice page, a focus area page, and some nestable content blocks called data blocks and resource blocks. This made for a pretty complex CMS.
A content model in Notion for one of the structured page types.
We decided to make these pages and blocks highly structured to ensure consistency. This was important to keep E3 content authors on track as they write content that previously tended to be difficult to read and internally oriented. We also knew that strict structure would make it easier for their audiences to understand E3’s pieces and parts and how they all fit together.
The outcome
The newly designed website is clear and cohesive. It is also beautiful! More importantly their team is empowered with the knowledge to maintain it over time. The E3 team member we worked with the most had this to say:
“I’ve especially loved to be in Ali and Amanda’s sphere. They’ve got such an amazing working relationship, and they’re so smart and ask such thoughtful questions. I’ve been so inspired by their work. It’s a huge breath of fresh air and I keep finding myself asking how they can help us on other challenging problems next.”