I collaborated with community members to co-design the East Palo Alto Community Archive website. 

I led my team at Idea2Form through the process of designing and building an accessible, comprehensive, multilingual digital archive, collaborating with community leaders throughout the process. My work was part of a full-service strategy including a new brand, social media strategy and assets, photo and video, archive infrastructure, and archive website.

The mission of the East Palo Alto Community Archive (EPACA) is to collect, share, promote, celebrate, and preserve the unique history of East Palo Alto, California for future generations.

The Challenge

• We needed to design and build sustainable, user-friendly systems from the ground up for 1) storing archive data, 2) showcasing archive materials, and 3) allowing people to submit new archive materials. 
  
• The archive must be accessible to an extremely diverse audience in terms of age, cultural background, and comfort with digital technology. 
• Earning community leaders’ trust was required for authentic collaboration and project success. 

The Opportunity

• The East Palo Alto community has strong leadership, vision, and sense of self. A diverse group of volunteers from the community who are committed to the archive’s success had already been established.
• East Palo Alto’s unique and beautiful history quickly captured the hearts of our team! 

What the community needed was a partner who respected and valued the unique history and character of East Palo Alto to build the brand and technical foundation for an archive that will last for many generations.

The Solution

I designed and facilitated a series of weekly participatory design workshops with community members. Together, we created website goals, personas, and user journeys. 

Impact: We had several voluntary participants at each session, and they reported feeling informed and listened-to. Participants take pride in the website and their impact on the site’s final design and organization. 



I tested designs with participants using task analysis at each stage, including card sort, wireframes, mockups, and the live site. 
 
Impact: During testing, we succeeded in each of the website metrics we co-created at the start of the design process.

We asked testing participants, “how much you agree or disagree with the following statements using a 1-5 rating, where 5 is strongly agree and 1 is strongly disagree” with the following average scores: 


See the Live Website  ︎︎︎