UX Research Helps Measures For Justice Serve Many Audiences.
Measures for Justice (MFJ) is a national non-profit committed to shaping the future of criminal justice in America by developing solutions that help communities – and the institutions that serve them – redefine how the criminal justice system works.
MFJ and ITX initially teamed up in 2021 to launch MFJ’s Commons portal in Yolo County, California. Building off that earlier success, MFJ asked ITX to help tackle another challenge.
CHALLENGE
The MFJ website was not delivering the moving experience their internal stakeholders expected, nor was the site’s messaging about MFJ’s vision, mission, and impact resonating with site visitors. Moreover, the site was not constructed with MFJ’s many audiences in mind.
ACTION
Embracing MFJ’s passion for data, researchers from our user experience (UX) design team conducted extensive discovery to deepen their knowledge of users inside the criminal justice ecosystem — from attorneys to inmates, from elected officials in City Hall to citizens in the public libraries.
RESULT
We applied our findings to deliver a re-designed, re-architected, and re-built website that delivers a refined online experience and communicates the MFJ mission, impact on society, and lays out their vision for a more just criminal justice system.
I’ve worked with ITX on three different projects. ITX’s commitment to process and communication is what sets them apart. They helped us get to the core of how we want our brand to be recognized, while ensuring real people perceived us as such, through usability tests.
The Challenge
The criminal justice ecosystem is vast and complex. Within it, MFJ serves a large and varied number of internal and external constituencies.
Their site’s information architecture, imagery, and on-page copy were not conveying the MFJ mission, vision, and impact as powerfully as internal stakeholders expected. As a result, their messaging failed to connect MFJ’s story with those who benefit from their work.
A nonintuitive interface and disorganized structure hindered site navigation, leaving users confused about where to go next. And even though content management was essential to the site’s effectiveness, the management system was difficult to use and required technical assistance to manipulate website copy.
As a data-centric organization, MFJ knows the value of data-informed decision-making and relied on ITX’s UX designers to gather, analyze, and apply stakeholder feedback to drive clarity around their needs and desired outcomes.
The Action
Through prior work together, ITX and MFJ developed a transparent, collaborative approach that contributed directly to a smooth journey.
Together, we explored challenges from the MFJ stakeholder perspective and analyzed site usage for business development and national engagement. With this data, we identified and prioritized key user personas and built an intuitive user interface (UI) to support each user segment.
- Early-stage and iterative discovery activities clarified the challenge to be solved and the users we were solving for.
- We conducted 360-degree stakeholder interviews, which informed our understanding of expectations, including a refreshed UX/UI, new workflows, and digestible content for promoting the MFJ brand.
We successfully migrated the MFJ site from a proprietary platform to WordPress, focusing on backend content management to enable powerful storytelling. Our UX research helped MFJ develop clear user personas and sound product vision.
- We refined the site’s information architecture and workflows to match a growing list of user personas.
- By benchmarking dozens of comparable websites in the not-for-profit space, we gathered ideas for how best to showcase MFJ’s impact and applied best practices for engaging audiences involved in social justice reform.
The Result
Validation of software development partnership best practices:
- Collaboration with a trusted partner.
- Mutual trade-offs that support the product vision.
- Sustained focus to deliver the data-driven product vision.
MFJ launched their dynamic new website on schedule, which ITX continues to host and provide maintenance and support. The redesigned site now includes 15 unique pages.
Keen to wisely steward our client’s investment, ITX creatively embedded efficiencies into every phase of this engagement – e.g., we provided 20+ WordPress custom blocks that help content managers make future enhancements.
After years of collaborative partnership, ITX delivered a high-touch engagement featuring mutual trust, shared objectives, and genuine transparency. Regular communication allowed us to address complex challenges in real-time to incorporate stakeholder and user feedback.
