Providing Community Assistance Where it Matters.
Pathways Vermont is a regional community support network aiming to transform the lives of people experiencing mental health, housing, and other life challenges. Pathways VT supports their community by guiding self directed paths to recovery and wellness while championing dignity, respect, and choice. With the ultimate goal of individual wellness and permanent housing, they advocate for the rights of people to live without stigma and discrimination, and promote civil rights, community integration, health care, and employment for all.
Industry: Social Services
Domain: pathwaysvermont.org
UX and Web Design performed as part of a collaborative, team effort during tenure at Bytes.co.
Design Challenge
The new website would be a hub for the social services campaign and provide resources to people experiencing mental health and other life challenges. It needed to be easy to navigate, quick to load, and easy to use for as many people as possible, making web accessibility and cross-browser/device support main considerations.
Pathways VT identified several main goals for their new site: to drive users to find the resources they need, make it easy for the community to donate to the initiative, promote their zero judgement philosophy, all with the hopes of encouraging more people to engage with their initiative.
How We Delivered
To be welcoming and uncomplicated the color palette was kept limited with sunny primary colors and shades of gray. A thick stroke-width heading typeface was chosen so users could quickly scan pages for content, this was paired with a gentle body font to compliment information-heavy pages. The homepage became a non intimidating welcome for potential clients, showing real photographs of people who engage with the program, and introducing them with short bios; this lead to a sense of authenticity, building trust and engagement.
Content was organized to funnel users to answer the main questions of: “who we are”, “what we do”, “how can I get support?”, and “how can I help?”. As users get to more specific content they find direct calls to action encouraging conversion.
Meeting WCAG 2.0 AA ADA guidelines at the time of launch, as well as an extensive cross-browser QA, the website directly accommodates for users in the target demographic that may use assistive technology or who may not have the most recent internet browsing device.
