Redesign forum community

Children's Rights in Society, BRIS, is a national organization in Sweden aiming to aid children and youth under the age of 18. The children can send messages to or chat with adults working at BRIS 24/7, or call a hotline about issues such as domestic violence and anxiety about grades.

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Bris had a forum on their web, and they knew their users wanted a forum where they could get help from other children and youth in the same situation instead of an adult at Bris. Still, the amount of users of the forum had shrunk year after year. In order to reignite the forum we needed to improve usability, novelty and functionality. The goal was to : Create a living and active forum community for children and youth under a new branding separate from, but still relatable to BRIS.

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Challenges:

• Create a new brand separate from, but still relatable to BRIS.
• To create a separate platform that could stand alone apart from the main BRIS website.
• The knowledge of how kids and youth use forums was severely limited at the beginning of the project.
• The budget did not allow for user research.

We started to explore the new branding. Several different design expressions were explored, combined and iterated during mutiple workshops with the client, see the image below which depicts one of the early expressions.

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We had a large amount of user data from the extensive user research from when developing BRIS main website. BRIS had a vision for their future forum and based on that, as well as the user data, we created a low fidelity prototype with in close collaboration with BRIS and developers. When the low fidelity prototype was validated by BRIS and developers, a high fidelity prototype was created in order to perform user tests with children and youth. As with the main website, the testing was done with expectation measure and tasks dedicated to examine specific functions and flows.

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The results from the user testning was promising but specific user issues were exposed and the design was altered to solve them. The image below features a few frames from the final prototype.

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Key takeaways:

• Color and form can be slightly altered to still relate to the original brand, in this case BRIS.
• From a designsystem perspective, many components can be reused and slightly altered in order to save time and budget.
• Analysis from similar services and websites can provide good insights on what to base the design on.

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