TI JIA WEI
Strathfield Sports Club Website Redesign
TIMELINE
ROLE
November 2023 - November 2024
UX Designer - user research, wireframing, prototyping and usability testing.
PROJECT BACKGROUND
The Strathfield Sports Club website was outdated and the club needed a new website with better usability. I worked closely with the tennis department, club managers and patrons from all areas of the club to develop a website to improve the club's administrative processes, reduce confusion among customers and decrease staff workload.
LAUNCHED WEBSITE PREVIEW
USER RESEARCH + DESIGN SOLUTIONS
As I worked in all areas of the club (sport, food and beverage), I spoke to customers and club staff in all departments directly to understand the problems they faced. I learned the internal processes and handled enquiries from customers first-hand, which gave me thorough insight to both the user and business perspectives.
Over the course of 4 weeks, I recorded the number and type of enquiries on my shift at the tennis shop. 80% of enquiries consisted of customers unsure on court bookings, sports policies and coaching program information. I tested the website with users to observe them navigate the website to find this information. Most users tried but had trouble locating target information from the top navigation.
To improve navigation in line with the club's desire to strengthen their brand identity by emphasising on Sport, Hospitality and Community, I devised a new sitemap. Based on that, I built an improved navigation menu with more visual cues and categorisation that made more sense to users.
Important pages like the tennis page, which is Strathfield Sports Club's highlight, was disorganised and hard to read.
MORE USER RESEARCH + DESIGN SOLUTIONS
Another challenge faced by both the club and customers was the membership registration. Customers were confused between the membership types. Registrations and payments were coming in through different modes, which caused misunderstandings among staff and customers, especially for tennis memberships which had a long waitlist.
lo-fi prototype
I tested the lo-fi prototype with clearer navigation, improved member's area and more organised information about the club on both users and managers to understand any remaining pain points or business needs. Due to time constraints, the fixes were incorporated into the hi-fi prototype below.
HI-FI PROTOTYPE
Based on the club's brand colours and vision for the website, I built the hi-fi prototype below and worked with the web dev agency that the club hired to finalise the website for launch.
I tested the dev site and worked with the agency's developer to fix up bugs that disrupted user flows, prioritising accessibilty issues. The main fixes involved:
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Text colour contrast in all sections (ie form fields, buttons) to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA
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Success messages in login, membership sign up, and membership portal to display next steps to users more clearly
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Clear visual cues to show when a tab is selected (in navigation and members portal)
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Wordpress editor not working as expected (adding button styles, calendar events, posts) which would disrupt website admin flows
The key improvements that have been achieved with the new website are:​
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Users find it easier to locate tennis information that are now categorised into events, competitions, coaching, shop, policies and news
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Staff are finding it easier to locate policies, forms and other club information​
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Clearer navigation on mobile
SUMMARY
As this project was taken on as an additional responsibility on top of my role as a tennis coach, pro shop assistant and bar attendant, I learned to multitask and collect feedback from customers, managers and other staff on the job. I took advantage of my interactions with people on the job to gain invaluable insight into the business and the customers to produce solutions that meet both user and business needs. Due to time constraints, there was a need to make some decisions only based on UX principles instead of testing on more users. An improvement to this project would be to carry out more user testing at each stage.