Blink UX

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

YMCA of Greater Seattle is a non-profit.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Blink UX?

We needed to launch a new website. They did a lot of our usability and UX/UI research before creating and designing the look and feel of our e-commerce website. The challenge that we proposed was to bring everything together. We had a very decentralized approach up until this point.

We had about 75+ rogue URLs or external websites and our job was to help aggregate all of them and bring everything to one website. We wanted users to look at one website and be able to not just think of one specific branch, but look at it as YMCA Greater Seattle across all 12 branches.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

What we wanted from them was a lot of research and study about our organization. They did stakeholder interviews and also interviews with various parts of the organization to better understand the needs and wants from a customer perspective, our member’s perspective, our volunteer’s perspective, our board members’ perspective, and also our association’s perspective. They took that information to help formulate a strategy on how the website should be created. They did a lot of usability studies because it is an e-commerce website, and we wanted to understand a good user flow, how the user comes to the website and actually converts and registers for a program, for a membership, or even for volunteering and donors.

So, there’s a lot of different angles that have to be looked at which is why they did their interviews from different points of view. This is very complex and complicated project from the YMCA perspective because we’re more than just a swim and gym.

We do a lot of community service, so we wanted to make sure the website could cater to all audiences. We also asked them to create and design a spec for the new website for us to hand off to our developers. Another part they agreed to help us with was the content auditing and the content development part of the website. There were six resources from Blink UX which included a project manager and two UX developers.

How did you come to work with Blink UX?

I came on right when they were selected, so I wouldn’t have too much context of the selection process. From my understanding, it was that we really wanted to work with someone who had the ability to be a part of our Open Y philosophy. We wanted to leverage a vendor that worked with multiple Ys, could transfer those skills and have the ability to share that information to other YMCAs. Blink worked with other Ys and was part of the Open Y philosophy that we’ve been trying to do with all our vendors.

How much have you invested with Blink UX?

[I can email you the information.]

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in May 2016, and the project was completed in August 2016.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

Since launch, we’ve had an increase of 26% new users from last year. Last year during the same time period we had 225,000 new users and this year was 350,000. We have more users and a 25% increase in average session engagement.

How did Blink UX perform from a project management standpoint?

They did really great, especially when things were outside of scope. The project got very complex in regards to working with multiple vendors at once. Being able to bring that complexity and new world to our culture and to our organization, they were able to navigate and work with us in the growing pains of trying to understand how to work with multiple vendors on a big project. We have a project manager intern, so we would just be using our Microsoft Suite for that.

What did you find most impressive about Blink UX?

They were very responsive. I felt like we were truly a team. They worked with us like they were a very small vendor, but I know they are a very reputable vendor. In regards to anything that was outside of scope in regards to the paper, they were always willing to help out. As a non-profit, we’re not resourced properly and never had a UX/UI agency to work with. They really hand held us all the way through to make sure that we were prepared for launch. They helped us understand what was needed even though it was something that was never on their plate.

Are there any areas Blink UX could improve?

No.