Role
User Interface Design
User Experience Design
Website Development
Overview
Hamlin Fistula Ethiopia required a new and more modern website to support the hospital’s future ambitions.
For this project the main users were both the visitors to the website, and the staff who work on updating the site. The website’s design provides an improved User Experience in both English and Amharic versions of the site, as well as more modern tools to help hospital staff to provide more up to date information for potential supporters and patients.
The previous site was built in 2015.
Objective
A visual redesign with a goal of improving accessibility the user experience for those who are not native English speakers and bringing the site’s design in line with others within the Hamlin family.
Improved front end performance, particularly for Amharic speakers, and those who may be accessing the site on slower internet connections in Africa.
Build better tools to make it easy to update for Australian staff and the Hospital’s Ethiopian staff
Use a visual design consistent with that used on the Australian site and store.
Solution
Multi-language support to allow two versions of the site, English and Amharic. Auto-translate solutions are not appropriate for this task, so native localisation of content was required.
New WordPress installation to ensure no outdated content resides in the site’s database.
Bespoke WordPress theme with a design in line with other Hamlin Fistula branding, with custom blocks created for WordPress’ Gutenberg page editor. Ensuring font/glyph compatibility when viewing the site in different languages by establishing suitable alternative fonts for those with only latin character set
Provide tools for staff to create content in either English or Amharic
Mobile friendly design to provide an improved experience for users on smartphone and tablet devices, particularly those on slower Ethiopian mobile networks.
Migration of existing content to suit new page builder and multi-language information architecture.
Improving usability and accessibly informed by the discovery phase of the project, with particular focus on Typography and Colour contrast.
Front End performance improvements focusing on the reduction of external assets to improve page load speed.
Optimisation of image assets to reduce load times.
Better Media Management capabilities to allow more efficient usage of the media library and organisation of the uploaded assets.
Website documentation for staff tasked with managing the website, outlining the new sites operation and functionality.
Outcomes
The new site made significant improvements to page load times. These times reduced in most cases by several seconds, despite the new site having more frequent use of larger media assets .
More consistent branding, which drew on the Australian organisation’s Style Guide to provide a consistent design feel across all Hamlin Fistula entities.
Hospital staff are creating native Amharic content for their Ethiopian supporters and patients, which was not previously possible.
