Context
UC Health Milk Bank is a nonprofit, HMBANA (Human Milk Banking Association of North America) accredited Milk Bank that provides safe, pasteurized donor breast milk to fragile infants in hospitals and homes. The Milk Bank leads multiple initiatives to promote equitable access to donor milk. The current digital experience lacks a single streamlined platform that clearly communicates how visitors can engage with the milk bank.
My Role
Product Manager
Lead UI Designer
UX Researcher
Methods
Competitive and Comparative Analysis
Heuristic Evaluation
Content Analysis & Audit
User interviews
Affinity mapping
Persona creation
User journey map
Sketching
Design Studio
MoSCow + Feature Prioritization
Usability Testing
Prototype Testing
Accessibility Audits
SEO Evaluation
The Focus
Information Architecture
Usability
Findability
SEO
Tools
Figma
FigJam
Figma Slides
Notion
Google Workspace
Zoom
Timeline
3 Week Sprint
Team
Karen Testa
Andy Miller
Erica Spievak
Dana Keenan
The Problem Space
UCH Milk Bank desired a digital platform that serves as a centralized hub for donors, hospitals, and families that features information about their mission, easy ways to donate, purchase milk, and access resources. They wanted the site to also feature storytelling and educational content to build community and trust. There is a lot of potential donor milk out there, but parents don't know about the importance and how to donate, therefore the milk bank has been unable able to reach the families that need it most. When visitors do get to the website they are unable to easily find what they are looking for due to unclear navigation.
Constraints
Limited donor supply
High processing costs
Strict safety regulations
Increasing demand from hospitals
Access limitations for families
HIPAA requirements (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)
Who are we designing for?
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Primary Audience: Potential milk donors
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Recent or soon to be mothers who can donate milk
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Typically women between 20s-30s who have recently given birth
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Hypothesis: women who are in a higher socio-economic bracket
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Secondary Audience: Recipient families
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Parents of premature or medically fragile infants looking to purchase/receive more info and reassurance that this is the right site to trust
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Tertiary Audience: Healthcare professionals (NICU staff, clinicians, lactation consultants)
Hypothesis
If the existing UC Health Milk Bank site restructures current information architecture to improve searchability, navigation, education, and overall user experience, then it will increase donor engagement, leading to growth in milk and/or monetary donations.
RESEARCH
Research methods
COMPETITIVE & COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
We analyzed Mother’s Milk Bank of California, Mother’s Milk Bank of Austin, and American Red Cross.
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Mothers’ Milk Bank Austin leads in distribution scale among nonprofit milk banks.
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Mothers’ Milk Bank California leads in legacy, credibility, and research partnerships.
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UC Health Milk Bank represents a growing hospital-system model that could reshape how donor milk is integrated into healthcare systems.
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The American Red Cross demonstrates what large-scale donor infrastructure can look like, though it operates in a different biomedical category as a comparator to UCH Milk Bank.
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Future competitive advantage will likely come from donor recruitment, digital engagement, and hospital integration
HEURISTIC EVALUATION AND CONTENT AUDIT
We evaluated the current UC Health Milk Bank website among heuristic principles. It scored the highest in credibility and lowest in delight, accessibility, learnability which we can improve upon in our redesign.
Score
Heuristic Category
User Interview Quotes
We conducted user interviews to uncover needs, behaviors, frustrations of current and past donor user groups. A few noteworthy quotes that came out of our interviews:
“I think the website needs to be streamlined.”
“It’s like blood donation— more people should know about it.”
“I wish there was more direct communication that didn’t need to go through MyChart because it can feel slightly overwhelming”
“I feared certain health conditions/habits I had would prevent me from being allowed to donate”
Key Interview Insights
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text text
Assumptions Validated by Insights
Users arrive with limited prior knowledge of how milk banks work and need clearer/simplified step-by-step explanations
Donors have questions/concerns around donor eligibility and whether or not they qualify health-wise to donate
Trust, safety, and legitimacy are primary decision drivers, especially for donors and recipient families
Users want streamlined information and the information architecture is not clearly structured on the current site, leading to confusion
User Persona 1
PROSPECTIVE DONOR
User Persona 2
REPEAT DONOR
User Journey
User Flow
Information Architecture
EXISTING SITE MAP
PROPOSED SITE MAP
Branding/Style Guide
Accessibility Consideration
Usability Testing
[to redesign into simplified graphic]
Outcomes: Metrics/Business Impact
Usability testing tasks:
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Find the Milk Donor Interest Form.
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Find the 5 steps to milk donation.
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Find the milk drop-off locations.
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Find the new outpatient family form.
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Find the merchandise section.​
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We defined 100% success as: direct paths under 10 secs with no more than 2 misclicks. In first round testing, all users failed to find the link for milk drop-off locations on the existing website
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[insert simplified graphic that shows usability testing metrics before and after]
Overall average of navigation was under the standards, over 1 minute each, with a success rate under 50%. Based on our proposed NEW website we have improved over 75% in all requested categories.​​​​
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SEO Consideration
Reflections & Next Steps
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Key Takeaways: with clearer paths for different target users, the website will be more effective
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Future iterations: explore more personas/user archetypes, allow users to create profile, possibility of gamification, calendar booking feature, collaboration with marketing, change ‘learning center’ to different wording
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Next steps: build site, further user research on other diverse user groups for broader data