Ideas
My strategy when planning redesigns is to hear from internal and external users their thoughts, likes, and frustrations with a product. This input is vital to the success of any product, and should influence a design team's direction. When prioritizing roadmaps, I like to use a simple prioritization matrix. One axis is time, the other axis is effort. This takes into consideration design, research, and development. I strive to make front-end changes that don't require back-end development. That said, here are some large and small recommendations:
- Elevation's Home page is simple, direct, and offers value for current and prospective members. The Locations page provides a full-service solution for attending and getting involved specific to that location. I would explore solutions that blend the two pages by adding an option to choose your location without leaving the Home page. Based off of that selection, the page would show relevant information for that user. The significance of doing this reduces the user's fatigue in finding what they're looking for.
- Another aspect I would challenge is the use of shadows in elements throughout the website. Apple's Human Interface Guidelines and Google's Material Design recommends using shadows sparingly and only for visualizing depth as seen in modals, popups, and interactions. It seems it's used on Elevation's site as an artistic effect rather a visual aid.
- The change I decided to design a solution for is in Elevation's app. In my solution, I focused on solving two things: navigation, and how the user browses sermons and media.
Proposal
Navigation
Top Nav
I trimmed the top nav to include only the page title and user profile. This removes the unnecessary logo, the channel slider, and livestream icon. The goal of these changes is to help provide clarity to the user, and optimize space.
Tab Bar
Without biting off more than I can chew in two days, I felt the Tab Bar needed to be cleaned up. I found a Tab Bar component from the Katana library that doesn't seem to be in production. I thought it was a nice visual and functional upgrade to the one that's currently in production.
This Tab Bar also adds a Watch and Community tab. Although this would require thorough planning, I envision the Community tab would replace Locations. Locations feels like a utility and doesn't explain what the user will get from it, while Community is inviting and promising.
The Watch tab is the page I designed to offer users access to all of Elevation's sermons and media. This is something the current app does not offer.
Watch
Steven Furtick is one of the greatest preachers in the world, and people want to hear his sermons! This page allows users to have access to the full library of Elevation's media in an easy-to-use, and low-code solution.
The Watch page shows the latest, featured, or live sermon at the top. The channels are listed under the featured content and act as a filter, not a redirect to the ministry's page. To optimize space, there are slider sections that scroll horizontally. The sections can be broken down into any category.
This page also offers a sort and filter option, to help the user find exactly what they're looking for.