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Overview

The Exchange serves as a resource hub providing HHS grant updates, technical support, and multimedia learning resources for recipients of Sexual Risk Avoidance Education (SRAE) or Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) grants.

I was brought in halfway through the FY26 grant year to take over management of the platforms and address the issues the client had identified as areas of improvement.

The 54% increase in resources being downloaded by grantees was due to my Information architecture work, user testing initiative, and the overall site redesign I led.

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Role: Platform Lead / UX & Product Lead

Team: Led 7-person cross-functional team (Developers, Security, PM, UX/UI)

Metrics: 241.5 Avg. Daily Users | 1.75 pages viewed per session | 01:17 average time per session

Technical Context: Federal website under ATO (Authority to Operate); Drupal Core with custom modules attached to a Moodle learning system.

The Challenge

When I came into the role, The Exchange website was suffering from years of organic growth and design debt. This was most obvious in the information architecture of the site. The homepage lacked clear user flows, the navigation, as it was discovered later by user testing, used confusing terminology, and the client had noted that users were not using the website as much as they should be. One additional factor that needed to be considered was that many of the grant recipients’ organizations had high turnover, so there was a constant influx of new users navigating the site for the first time.

My Approach & Actions

To address this, I took a three-pronged approach:

1. Creating and Enacting a Targeted Research Plan – I designed and executed a research roadmap to diagnose the root causes of the discoverability issues. I led the user recruitment and conducted interviews with core audience. I analyzed and communicated the findings to the design and development teams.
2. Evaluating and Refactoring the Information Architecture (IA) -using the findings from the user interviews, I mapped out a new IA and worked with the UI/UX design team to translate these findings into clean, intuitive, navigational wireframe. See the past and future site maps here
3. Continuous Design Validation – Before handing wireframes off to the engineering team, I ran validation sessions with end users to ensure that the redesigned categorization schemas aligned with how public health professionals conceptualize their daily workflows.

Outcomes

As the contract ended, we saw an increase in resources downloaded from around 19.5 per day to almost 36 downloads per day, a 54% increase in resources downloaded on average. Though there was not an opportunity to reach back out to users post launch, the client reported high levels of satisfaction with the project.