The Festival of Black Art & Ideas
blackartsandideasfest.com

UX Writing, Content Strategy

A website for a new Black arts festival commemorating Juneteenth.

Organization served:
The Chattanooga Festival of Black Arts & Ideas (CFBA&I) is a multi-day festival produced by ChattaNAP, whose site structure I also designed and content I wrote, which orbits around Juneteenth and focuses on highlighting Black artists and performers in the Chattanooga, TN area.

Project brief and client goals:
In early 2021, ChattaNAP leadership was looking to redesign and relaunch the website for the Festival of Black Arts & Ideas site before the beginning of their events scheduled for the coming year.

They wanted an informational/promotional website that better fit their recent rebranding efforts and allowed for the site structure to evolve with the festival.

Leadership shared that site visitors including community members looking to attend events, artists looking to apply to perform, and organizations looking to donate, had found the existing site hard to navigate and “too wordy”.

Their main goals with the site redesign were:
⊛ Improving discoverability of festival schedule
⊛ Driving festival donations
⊛ Gaining volunteers

Initial findings:
After digging into the site and evaluating content and structure, these were my findings:

Structure:
⊛ Site was not mobile-friendly
⊛ Site was difficult to navigate because information architecture was unclear
⊛ Pages were largely unstyled without content containers/bounding boxes, making the site look unfinished and donations less likely

Content:
⊛ No designated page for current-year festival events
⊛ No existing newsletter sign-up feature
⊛ Descriptions of the festivals didn’t exist yet, not clear that there were actually several festivals nested in one main festival
⊛ No designated contact person or form for site visitors looking to volunteer
⊛ Unclear who to contact when trying to reach the festival Imagery on the site only included historical images and didn’t indicate where the festival took place or what the content of the festival might be
⊛ Each page of the site included historical and educational information rather than having educational materials located on one page or facts introduced in context

Project actions completed:

Structure:
⊛ Designed a responsive, mobile-first site
⊛ Created a new information architecture that revealed, profiled, and linked the individual festivals nested within the larger festival, allowing the festival pages structure to grow with future popularity and future programming
⊛ Used Webflow to allow for members of the festival team to be able to work directly with a CMS to edit their site content

Content:
⊛ Performed copy and content audits to centrally gather all existing site materials
⊛ Rewrote each existing page
⊛ Created and wrote copy for new pages including About, Contact, FAQ, Community Partners, Past Highlights, Schedule Page, Events Page, and individual events pages
⊛ Designed ‘Home’ page to highlight newly-made informational video above the fold
⊛ Designed new individual festival page structure that includes historical profiles of significant figures in Black art and the events programmed to honor their legacies
⊛ Designed a functional footer with current year schedule linked, email newsletter sign-up capture, donation page link, and volunteer contact page link
⊛ Designed a contact form for community members looking to volunteer, vendors looking to get involved, and artists hoping to perform
⊛ Wrote descriptions of all current festivals, events, past donors and yearly accomplishments
⊛ Designed a new “Contact” page and wrote out brief team members bios
⊛ Changed all site imagery to include photos from actual org events and prioritize the people hard at work to make
⊛ ChattaNAP a great organization
⊛ Wrote metatags and meta descriptions for better SEO and screen reader accessibility
⊛ Worked with a front-end designer to build out rebrand-appropriate color palette and design flourishes
⊛ Created event images to quickly explain each event scheduled and be used on CFBA&I’s social media channels

Teammates:
Guillermo Casanova: front-end designer and developer, UI and interaction designer

Goals met?
To ensure that we were meeting our client’s goals, we met with ChattaNAP leadership regularly to discuss our design strategies and progress until the site went live.

Within the first month after launch, CFBA&I received: $3500+ in new donations 100+ Contacts from volunteers, venders and other people interested in the festival 90+ Newsletter signups The most well-attended events they’ve ever produced

❀ Alana Questell ✏ UX Writer & Content Strategist

❀ Alana Questell
✏ UX Writer & Content Strategist