experience designer + (they / them)
Raise Our Voice Australia
UX Strategy and Culture
Photo
Masih Alinejad - New Martyrs of Iran
#mahsaamini
Raise Our Voice Australia (ROVA) aims to educate young people from marginalised backgrounds on political representation and activism to implement systemic change from within.
Drawing attention to the absence of women and gender diverse people from Australia's political landscape; ROVA 's raison-d'être is global, dynamic powershift through empowering voices that often go unheard.
We needed greater media exposure to get the word out
Marginalised experiences are at the heart of what ROVA is about. All online and social media communications must bring diverse voices to the fore. This was not the content users were seeing from the outset when I joined this volunteer based not-for-profit organisation .
We needed stories to be made accessible to journalists to boost media traction so that they could access the plethora of research ROVA had diligently compiled. We needed to tell real stories and create diverse relatable content, made accessible across all online platforms in a simple and consistent manner.
Together with the media team, I created fresh content and redesigned the look and feel of the website according to the pre-existing brand kit and made some critical changes to the layout of information for accessibility.
We are currently working on social media presence, to be more representative of our entire community. My role within the team is to identify any pain points and I give my time to increase their awareness of UX principles in regular training workshops.
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head to the raise our voice website to view my work
Before
After
(links to social media accounts were already available in the website footer)
Auditing the site's accessibility with WCAG 2.1 AA - I took on the challenge of upgrading ROVA's UX maturity to improve legitimacy. While keeping the overall product and branding identical to that of their midyear brief, I prioritised urgent accessibility obstacles such as clunky animations and pink font on red backgrounds, reducing "walls of text" and adding alt-text image descriptions - all without compromising the content and flow of the original site the team worked hard for.
The previous logo had inaccessible colour contrast making it invisible to users with colourblindness.
Keeping to ROVA'S branding colour guide I created this updated logo with a better colour contrast rating.
what's next?
Research
I'm conducting usability testing on our online products and training with participants of ROVA's 2023 online training workshops on leadership and marginalised groups empowerment.
After tying off this year's annual report, myself and Nat (Head of Research at ROVA) are compiling stories taken from this year's research report in order to bring relevant stories to our strategy design session and create new content in a variety of media.
Strategy
From May to July I am running strategy design workshops with the Heads of ROVA, business advisors and a diverse interdisciplinary team of members of the organisation to identify core values and build a new organisational plan.
My engaging iterative design workshops are online with our next in person session running in July this year. Once we have defined our strategy, my role as a service designer is to manage change from a partial not-for-profit to a fully funded social entreprise.
Design
Findings from the research will also be used to inform decisions on our branding and website redesign in July, with an emphasis on storytelling - with less blocks of texts, and video interviews from diverse members of our community instead of image tiles on instagram.
I'm working with Tiff (Head of Branding and Social Media) to increase diversity and look at changing the visual presentation of our brand. We will introduce a new colour palette to increase the visibility of our online content, and change the format and decision making process of how we create posts on social media.
