GRCOA Website Rework
GRCOA (Grand River Council on Aging)
2025-2026
Project Case Study
Overview
The GRCOA (Grand River Council on Aging) is a charitable not-for-profit organization that seeks to create an age-friendly community for users aged 5 to 105. Part of their mission is to ensure that elders (aged 50 and above) have access to the resources they require. They achieve this in part through their website. The GRCOA recognized that, due to their users being tied to a particular age, their user base will evolve over time and eventually require a new strategy for delivering information. Our team was tasked with assessing how the users will change and to propose a design solution that could evolve with them.
The project focused on some key problem areas:
Overhauling an outdated and difficult-to-maintain information architecture
Exploring a new content strategy for mobile-first users
A SWOT analysis of the GRCOA
Our competitive analysis of the current landscape in which the GRCOA operates.
Process
Phase 1 - Environmental Scan
This project started with a quick environmental scan. We wanted to understand what the GRCOA excelled at and compare those traits to similar organizations to identify potential areas for improvement as well as possible threats. This would let us set some initial design goals that could guide us through subsequent project phases.
Phase 2 - Discovery
Generating Archetypes
After gaining an understanding of our client and current design, we needed to begin understanding who we were designing for. To understand the way users will interact with digital spaces in 20 years, we needed to look at users who would be considered elders in the future. Our initial user base thus included individuals aged 30 to 60. Through an initial screener survey, we gained some base-level insights into our users as well as leads into potential interviewees.
Since our user base was so vast, we knew that simple personas would not be effective in highlighting the diversity that we encountered during the interview phase. This is why we opted for the more general and all-encompassing nature of archetypes. Interviewees were asked basic questions about how they interact with digital spaces and their information-seeking behaviours. We hoped to gain insights that would not only be useful in understanding potential design directions but also in understanding the users themselves. We dug for motives and recurring behaviours that informed how the users operated. Each interview was transcribed and coded to analyze the findings. These codes were then mapped to create a visual representation of all our data. As we observed the clusters forming, we began generating some archetypes.
Building Journey Maps and Storyboards
With each archetype we developed, we also created a journey map to pair with it. We wanted to visualize exactly how these users were arriving at the website and how they were finding the information they needed. This would be helpful in clarifying pain points and guiding our design process.
With our archetypes and journey maps completed, we began converging our design thinking and fleshing out some potential design direction. These storyboards would be our guiding lights when we begin user testing. They followed various user journeys based on our archetypes and use cases of the website and helped us to further empathize with users.
By the end of our discovery phase, we had a clear picture of our users: mobile-first and rooted in social media.
Phase 3 - User Testing (Current Phase)
*We are currently carrying out user testing for this project. Updates will be added as the phase comes to a close.*
To begin our testing phase, the team first devised a card sort and benchmark tree test to help lay the groundwork for the app. We envisioned a complete overhaul of the current information architecture and therefore conducted an open card sort, allowing us to get a clearer mental model of our users as they familiarized themselves with the cards. The GRCOA's website contains years of content and acts as not only an information source but also an archive of the GRCOA's work. This led to there being over 150 cards once the audit of the site was completed. This amount would be cumbersome for users to sort during testing, and the team feared they may not be able to complete a card sort that long. To set up a more successful test, the team made some low-level groups of items that were very clearly related (for example, Newsletter 2023 and Newsletter 2024 could simply be Newsletters). When doing this, the goal was to only reduce the granularity of the cards rather than assume how users would categorize them.
