Connecting, educating, and inspiring the next generation of neuroscientists through free, accessible virtual events for high school to undergraduate students globally.
IYNA is looking to develop an updated, user-friendly website that increases accessibility, member engagement, and organizational functionality. We envision that the new website will replace our current one, and will contain member login portals/dashboards and interactive features that will also aid in the management of our global chapter network. The website will serve as a centralized platform for our free neuroscience resources, event information, and chapter engagement, and will thus directly contribute to our mission of connecting and educating young neuroscientists.
During our first week with IYNA, we familiarized ourselves with their organization, members, and goals. We explored the current website alongside IYNA administrators and thoroughly examined their user base. We discussed their objectives for the website redesign and explored additional features like a member dashboard and gamification elements. Our process included an in-depth analysis of their Discord server to understand how to effectively transfer its functionality to the new website.
Given the substantial features that IYNA requested, we had to break down the project into 3 phases:
This structure will play a key role in how our PRD is defined.
Our initial PRD was ambitious, including all three phases mentioned above. We established that redesigning the website was a must-have while the dashboard remained an important secondary feature. This approach originally divided our timeline into three distinct phases. However, design inherently involves numerous iterations and feedback loops, which led us to readjust our timeline to focus solely on the website redesign and dashboard implementation. From the beginning, our primary goal was to deliver a polished core experience that effectively merged the website functionality with the Discord server.