Cancer Council’s Tackling Tobacco program helps local community service organisations go smoke-free. Cancer Council contracted my team to turn the program’s web pages into an information hub and one-stop resource shop.
Significance: This project was all about balancing the needs of the business with the needs of the user and designing an engaging site using a lean UX approach.
My role: 
Tools: Sketch 3.0, InVision, pens, paper, and a little content expertise
Team: Toby Minton, Gabrielle Gardner, Adam Parsons
Timeframe: 2.5 weeks
Finished product: Tackling Tobacco pages
PROBLEM
Cancer Council needs engaging pages to provide information and resources and make the complex Tackling Tobacco program look easy.
SOLUTION
Redesign the existing pages to increase emotional appeal, placing information and key resources where service organisations expect to find them.
RESEARCH
Based on the brief documents, we outlined a comprehensive research plan before our kickoff meeting. A massive obstacle was looming, but at the time we couldn’t see it.
-Website analysis
-Interviews
-Contextual inquiries
-Surveys
WEBSITE ANALYSIS
We started our research by analysing Tackling Tobacco’s existing web pages and evaluating what other companies in the same space were doing well.
Findings:
The top-rated sites had several key traits in common: They all used big, emotive images to create a personal connection, limited scrolling to keep pages easy to scan, clear and simple navigation, and a good ratio of images to text.
All of these traits could help the Tackling Tobacco pages we had analysed, so we were feeling positive. Then we hit a roadblock.
INTERVIEWS
At our first stakeholder meeting, we learned we couldn’t get access to the target users without a vetting and approval process of several days to a week.
With just a little over two weeks to do the entire project, we couldn’t afford to wait for those interviews.
Lean UX to the rescue
To keep our deadline we shifted to a lean UX process. We continued to chase interview subjects in the background, but with an eye toward booking them for usability testing. In the meantime, we moved into ideation and sketching based on business goals and secondary user interviews.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
We started plotting the content by pouring over the Tackling Tobacco toolkit (the source of the copy) and plotting an information architecture that would make the program easily accessible.
Then it was time to tackle the content itself. While in-depth content writing was beyond the scope of the project, figuring out how to best break the copy and make it more digestible was a primary goal. So once we had rough wireframes, I dove into the copy and figured out what could be represented as icons or infographics vs what could stay in small blocks of text.
Meanwhile, the primary user interviews started trickling in, helping inform and validate our design decisions.
TESTING & ITERATION
I played a lead role in recruiting users and conducting test sessions. Why? Because I honestly enjoy usability testing. That’s not a statement I ever thought I’d make. What kind of weirdo likes watching and conducting usability testing? Apparently my kind.
We tested in person and online with as many of our primary users as we could track down in the time allowed, and then we broadened the pool to include secondary users and subject matter experts from Cancer Council.
In all we tested and modified through five iterations of the Tackling Tobacco pages, finally arriving at a design that our users could quickly grasp and enjoy.
Click to view the interactive prototype in a separate tab.
REPORTING
One of my goals for this project was to ensure we produced clear and comprehensive reports for Cancer Council. After all, most of what they wanted was a path forward for their site. If we didn’t give them reports that made that path clear, we wouldn’t be doing our job.
Check out the full reports on Google Drive:
NEXT CHAPTER
The goal of this project wasn’t to create a full set of pages, but to provide a few pages to serve as a template and develop a plan to help Cancer Council move forward. The link to the full plan PDF is above, so I’ll just hit the highlights.
- Create the core pages we designed: landing page, How the program works, policies.
- Create supporting pages: Resouces, FAQs, Research, Stories.
- Using the plan and previous pages as a template, create pages for the other five elements of the program.
To better improve the full experience for community service organisations, we also made a number of recommendations, including the following:
- Add grant information and invoice templates to the Resources and FAQs pages. (most users went to those pages first when looking for grant info)
- Consider engaging a content writer to make the language less formal.
- Add online training elements, such as videos of the on-site sessions, and short ads to show the real effects of smoking
WHAT THIS PROJECT TAUGHT ME
In a perfect UX world, we would exhaust all avenues of research before starting the next phase, but that perfect-world scenario can be a rare beast. This project gave me a chance to adapt on the fly and find the best way to move around and over obstacles. When we couldn’t research enough up front, we used what knew to start designing and then used research to validate as it trickled in, ensuring our designs stayed user-centred.
This project also gave me an opportunity to balance my writing past with my UX present, finding ways to leverage both without straying outside the bounds of the project’s scope. It was a delicate a balancing act, but I didn’t fall. Maybe the circus is my true calling.
FINISHED PRODUCT
Toby Minton 