High Spirits Website

Tasked with designing a mobile and desktop website within the category of ‘health’, I began to research potential user groups who have unaddressed issues. With this exploration proving alcohol consumption to be a growing concern for younger generations, this became the focus of the following project. The first weeks of this project began by looking into competitors and similar existing organisations, allowing the following work to be targeted towards a unique demographic. This was followed by interviews, allowing real people’s problems and goals to be considered and a more empathetic design process to be achieved.

These interviews provided a huge amount of insight, forming the direction for the following development – It was raised that all sites are targeted towards total sobriety, with minimal support for people wanting to simply cut back or drink less. Combining the interviews conducted for this project with similar research from other students, I was able to create three personas, helping to guide any following choice and ensuring the desires of potential users are addressed.

At this point, the website’s concept and direction began to take shape – A platform to provide support and information for drinkers who want to cut back, as well as organising sober events, helping to alleviate the pressure many people feel to drink in social settings. This targets a niche and currently unsatisfied demographic, allowing this website to meet the goals of this specific group.

With these personas created, there was an extensive period of initial ideation, conceptualising different formats and structures the website could take. This began with the mobile version, working to find a balance between efficient, straight-forward navigation and an enticing visual journey to keep users engaged. This process is essential to ensuring a successful direction is selected, forming a solid foundation for the following testing and designing. Having trialled an array of approaches for the page layouts, I was able to quickly develop these into low and mid fidelity wireframes.

Having a clickable digital prototype, a phase of user testing was conducted, again ensuring the site was tailored towards the users in every aspect. This included closely observing how the overall navigation operated to unprompted users, better appreciating how organic website visitors would interact with the website. The results of these significantly impacted the progression of the site – It moved further away from being a platform for information, something many existing organisations already do, and more towards the informal, supportive and social aspects. This became the distinct direction for the brand, now called High Spirits.

With this research and testing concluded, the following design work was a hugely iterative process, developing both the mobile and desktop sites. There was a need throughout to remain consistent with the brand created, using small, illustrated elements and a splashy home page to draw users into the website’s content. The colour palette used was intentionally restrained, using the vibrant yellow shade as an action colour, signifying clickable or interactable elements. A full breakdown of the design process and decisions is featured in the report is available below, outlining specific design choices, the reasoning for these decisions as well as the evolution of specific elements and pages.

While this was established as a web design project, I developed an additional promotional campaign for social media use. With High Spirit’s content being focussed on people who want to drink less, there are many people that may need convincing of this, needing an easy way into this content without having the push to find the site themselves. With the social events becoming the primary focus of the website, tailored towards the primary persona, this was reflected in this campaign, using active, dynamic imagery to engage viewers. Combined with a bold and personable tagline to hook viewers in, this campaign would become the entry point for many users, being led to the site through this advertising.

This process has given me an incredibly valuable insight into the importance of a length research process for user-focussed design, ensuring the following outcomes are highly appropriate and tailored towards its target demographic. It allowed the following website, both mobile and desktop, to be hugely successful due to its deep connection to real user’s struggles and goals, with this collected data and research influencing every design decision.