Advantage Evans Academy Website

Advantage Evans Academy (AEA) is a website that teaches you about the basics of cryptocurrency and blockchain encryption. It also covers Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) and how you can manage them to claim and control the ownership of their digital art.
It was created by a talented woman named Dr. Tanya M. Evans, the goal of Advantage Evans is to empower those with limited resources to become financially advanced in the new digital economy.

I collaborated with a friend of mine named Andre Fudge while doing the My General Assembly UX design boot camp to redesign the AEA website, and we were given a total of three weeks to complete the project. We meet the client Crystal Houston to discuss certain things about AEA, like the main goals, how they satisfy their customers and what are their main problems about their website.
Making sure that you understand the client and what their goals/expectations are is crucial in maintaining a good relationship between yourself and a client. Arranging meetings with the client frequently during the span of your project is also very important, for it build trust between you and the client.
We sieved through the massive information Crystal gave us and identified the major points and pain points we would need to focus on. Taking that information we started planning the best way to get enough data, we decided to conduct a survey to gain insight on people's knowledge of cryptocurrency and NFT’s. We made the survey for everyone but also targeted AEA main audience, the black community and the black women between 18-50 years old. We got responses to our survey and started analyzing the responses to find various trends and common grounds. We asked the people who responded to our survey if they would be willing to participate in our interview and 15 people agreed and we interviewed them within a span of 3 days. We asked questions such as

Can you tell me about any information you know about cryptocurrency
In your response u said u were using --- app/website for cryptocurrency, why do u prefer that app over the the others
What are some experiences you’ve had with educational websites like masterclass or Udemy
Do you trust the current state of Crypto or NFT(why)

And we got a variety of responses such as

“Every one of these people like seeing the benefits and the disadvantages to different crypto apps”
“ I actually give a small talk about the value of NFT's and how people need to understand what a NFT is”
“What makes us trust the crypto-market, the tokens and cryptocurrency? You know some people, they choose to buy bitcoin because they hear stories of stuff “
“I’ve heard of cryptocurrency but I’m not familiar with NFT’s”

Which propelled us as a unit to start thinking of ways to effectively show the users that cryptocurrency is for everyone and the benefits of being involved in the Cryptomarket.
We came up with various sketches and ideas of what we thought is the best way of showcasing the AEA personality and alleviating the user's doubts about cryptocurrency and NFT’s, the problem for us was effectively combining the clients ideas and what is best for the customer. We discussed what would be the customer journey and how AEA would be most effective, and decided to create a storyboard explaining the customer journey. After the customer journey, a few rounds of sketching and iterations we both had our own wireframes of places where the client interest should be placed and the interest of the customer should be placed also.
We headed down to Figma to upload our work into digital content and compare each other's sketches and iterate upon them. We took parts from here and there and started wireframing, building the basic layouts without any content. Having done that it was time for our weekly meeting with our client which was every Wednesday for the 3 weeks given to us, we presented the wireframe and data gathered from our surveys and interviews. The presented data gave our client an idea of which direction we were heading to and to involve her into the process of redesigning the website. We got some feedback from her and then went back to work.
Iterating and applying the data researched alongside with the feedback from our client we had created the first prototype design, now it was time for the UI and interactions of the website. We thought of a linear storytelling (onboarding) method where the user is presented with the benefits of joining the academy and the services they provided. We added a few colors both calm and bright, originally from the AEA website. We moved on from the design studio to User testing and usability, we asked those we interviewed if they would be willing to enjoy us in the user testing and they agreed, we shared the links out and held zoom conference calls and made some observations of how they (The Users) interacted with the prototype. Recording the errors made and the levels of ease in completing a task we were able to make note of where more attention should be given and where we should focus on the content rather than the UI and other insights. We iterated once again and it was time again for another meeting with our client. To our surprise we were having a special guest attending the meeting, and it was Dr. Tanya M. Evans, although it was unexpected, it was highly favorable for us to have feedback from both Mrs. Crystal and Dr. Tanya. We presented the second prototype and there was a huge impact because we created more awareness of what they were lacking in their original website. We got more feedback and we once again started iterating the second prototype, tested it with our users and changed it to our third prototype and held the final meeting as the time given for our project was ending soon. We received some more feedback, mostly on placement of content and color besides that we had done a good job. Taking this feedback we made some more changes in accordance to the feedback received and took all what we had done in the past 3 weeks into google slides and practicing for our presentation
We finally had ended our 3 weeks and now it was time to present to the client what we had done and to the rest of the boot camp what were the fruits of our labor. We spent between 25 to 30 minutes presenting our redesign and how we combined what the client wants and what the customer wants into a single page. We took time to explain our process and how we got our data and what were the key components which affected our decision making in certain areas.
At the end of the presentation we followed up with the client to receive some feedback about the presentation and the final prototype, which was lengthy but full of essential details that we tried to embed into our project.