How to create a parents oriented website in under 12 hours: a Case Study into rapid research, design and development as one-man stop shop.
I’ve received a brief to redesign a children entertainment center website based in Staten Island, NY. With current site being developed in late 2000s and being a desktop only version with gifs all over, the client requested new, fully responsive website that follows the current trends in design. Client additionally requested an integrated calendar to be on the site that allows users to see what events coming up in near future. Sounds like pretty much every other client brief that I came across before. The catch though … it has to be done in one day (from design to development). Actually, full working day or 8 working hours. That’s all client has budget for. I decided to go for it, since I’ve never designed a site in such short time, let alone built it up after.
Challenge accepted.
My roles: UX Researcher, Visual Designer and Front-End Developer
Users & Audience
The users of the website are parents of kids from 1 to 9 years old. I’ve gone over the site before and talked to the client to find out as much information about who usually visits the site and who is the target user. There was no time and need to do any actual Usability Testing on the old site, because client understood that the site is outdated and needs to be changed.
Platform of Choice | Constraints | Budget
I’ve decided to go with WordPress, a platform I’ve been personally using for past 10 years for 95% of the sites I ever built. Since I have such a tight deadline for the new site, WordPress was a perfect choice for an express built.
Budget: my daily rate for … well, one day of work.
Research
To start off the project I’ve talked to the owner of the Children Entertainment Center (later I will be mentioning it as CEC) to see what kind of design they are looking for their new site and what are the challenges they stumbled upon before on their site.
I’ve previously also performed a free Heuristic Evaluation for myself to see where can I combine information to make site less cluttered. Here is the short new Information Architecture of the site menu as a lo-fi sketch (old and new).
These screenshots below are the sites that client showed me, as well as my own research for a new look.
As you can see the design of these sites is very colorful, has lots of pictures that represent kids in a fun environment and text is very easy to read. With that mind, I quickly sketched a few Lo-Fi ideas that I shown to the client and basically got a go-ahead to do any of these.
I’ve mentioned to the client of CEC that the site won’t be using regular serif of san-serif fonts for header text, but will actually have more of “child wrote these” font. Client loved it. At this point I was already a bit over 1 hour into my work day. I decided to combine a couple of ideas into one for home page.
I also realized that the calendar might have 2 functions: 1) Users register to view calendar and can view times available for entertainment and be able to block off times; 2) Calendar is available to general public to view and everything on the calendar is controlled by the admin of the site. I asked the client and client clarified that users cannot register for the calendar and calendar will only show event times. From there users can follow a link to eventbrite to purchase tickets to events. Site will consist of 6 pages and content will be provided by the client. There will be no User Persona development, no User Journey or any Usability testing done as well due to budget and time constraints.
Design of the Home page
So far 2 hours completed out of my 8.
WHAT DO I DO NOW? That’s what I asked myself franticly right after I got an approval from client to start actual creative work and so far I had nothing to show for except for a few Lo-Fi mockups.
I decided to do some research of finding images that suit a colorful palette of the logo and the mood that I was going for in my design. I was basically looking for kids that have a good time interacting with each other in indoor children entertainment centers such as my client. Client had no images like that in good quality and only had images of the space itself. Finding images that suit the mood I was going for actually took more time than I expected. They either were too “generic” or really fake looking and not very professionally executed either by the photographers. Here are some that I found via Shutterstock:
I jumped into designing right in WordPress. I had no time to do hi-fidelity mockups in Sketch or Figma. Since I already had an idea on how site should look like and I did have a logo and colors to have a color palette for the site, I started to work on home page. Home page took me about 4 hours to do using a DIVI builder from https://www.elegantthemes.com/, as well some custom CSS. Here is the final version presented to the client, so it can be approved to be built out more pages on the new site.
OK, I am 6 hours in at this point. I have 2 left out of my projected time.
I’ve submitted the design to the client. I got an instant approval of the design. INSTANT. No redesigns, no changes. Nothing.
Time to build out the rest of the pages — About, Gallery, Events (the Calendar page), Packages (on original site, this page is actually spread across 2 pages and it made no sense to have content on 2 different pages, so it was combined into 1 page) and Contact Us page (original site also had a Directions page but that got moved to this page) .
I decided to build out About page to show to the client as a base template for all other pages. That one was completed in about an 1 hour. When that page got approved I was at 7 projected hours out of 8. I have no time left to do other ones. I decided to suck it up and complete the work as fast as I can, with best results provided in the end. Here are the final pages that were presented to the client (not including Home page) in no particular order.
After this client looked at the site and approved it for launch!
Yay, right?
Well, I am 10 hours in at this point. The previous site had no SEO done on it and I decided to throw in a freebie for this client and added some very basic SEO to each of the pages. Then I tried to launch it. Long story short, I didn’t realize that the hosting of old site is not compatible with new. So I jumped on the phone call with the hosting and we figured out the problem together with a very knowledgable (a very hard find) hosting representative.
11 hours in. I am way over my estimated hours. Site is launched but I need to do some basic post-launch QA to make sure everything is showing up and working: buttons point to actual pages, links work as they should and images are showing up through the site. Completed in 35 minutes.
FINAL TIME: 11 HOURS 35 MINUTES.
Outcome
Site is launched. Client happy. I am exhausted.
Next Steps
Train client in how to use the site. I did trainings before in my career on WordPress and usually takes another 30–60 min to explain how everything is working for basic editing.
Leanings | Where did the project leave off?
Overestimate your hours for work a bit. Give yourself some cushioning for extra work you might not see at the moment before starting your work. Projected was 100% completed from my side in one day.
You can view the final site here.
P.S. for those who are interested in my services: if you are looking for a new site that needs to be done rapidly, ask me about my daily rates :)
“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”– Winston Churchill
