If you like to bike in Seattle, you’re probably already a fan of Cascade Bicycle Club. It’s the nation’s largest statewide bicycling nonprofit, and serves bike riders of all ages, races, genders, income levels, and abilities throughout Washington.
Cascade wanted to improve its website to be more user-friendly, and align better with values of inclusivity and its vision of “a safe and healthy future where bicycles bring people together, eliminate inequity, and create thriving communities.”
That’s where Communication Leadership Consulting came in. The program enables faculty and students to work together to provide communications support to mission-driven organizations, local government, and small businesses in our community.
Our Comm Lead students – Lexi Zhang, Leah Breen, and Pengzhou Huang, were chosen to work on this project as they all bring in expertise from diverse fields – UX research, website building, and content strategy, respectively. The project ran during Winter and Spring quarters, under the leadership and guidance of Comm Lead faculty, Misty Weaver, who has overseen many website redesigns, both, inside and outside the UW.
“This project gave us the opportunity to engage with our client, work with the UW iSchool, and pool efforts to create deliverables that balance audience needs with best practices. Seeing everyone come together to support and elevate each others’ work is a true highlight!” Weaver said.
The student participants believe that this project has been a terrific deep dive into understanding how organizations can craft their brand message and align it with their target audience’s interests, needs, and expectations across their audience journey. By working for a local client, they’ve understood how to utilize research findings appropriately and comprehend the requirements of a smooth user journey flow.
“To start with who is visiting our site and what they want to accomplish is a fantastic approach to thinking through how to design a fresh site,” explained Joseph Roberts, the Tech Consultant at Cascade, who worked closely with the students.
This project is a great example of how the community is interdependent, and everyone has something to offer to the other.
Building on the success of the Cascade redesign, Communication Leadership Consulting hopes to help many more organizations improve their communication through UX/UI projects, video storytelling, content strategy, and much more!
To learn more about the Communication Leadership Consulting, check here.
University of Washington
Department of Communication