Smash the Pa(y)triarchy
A digital resource to combat the gender wage gap
Role: Content Strategist/UX Designer
Timeframe: Four months
Tools: Sketch, Canva, Google Surveys
Challenge: Creating a digital resource that provides women with tools to negotiate their salaries, earn their worth, and advocate for each other — with the ultimate goal of narrowing the gender wage gap.
Background: As part of SHINE, a design mentorship program run by AIGA, I worked with a UX mentor to execute a project around the theme of ‘design for good.’ My mentor and I chose to focus on the gender wage gap, because we are both passionate about this issue. I used my content experience to focus on the content side of the project, while my mentor used her graphic design and digital agency expertise to help guide our process.
Content Discovery
We began our process by deciding what information we wanted to focus on to drive our content.
Research Plan
We conducted primary and secondary research to gather data on the gender wage gap. Our primary research consisted of a survey that received over one hundred responses; he survey provided insights into how women and people who identify as non binary have experienced the wage gap throughout their careers.
The quotes we received from the survey created empathy within us, and within our project process, because reading them enabled us to truly comprehend how the wage gap affected the users. These insights acted as the foundation for our content decision making, and led us to include quotes in our resulting high fidelity website mockup.
Interface Design
Mood Boards
Creating mood boards enabled us to compile our thoughts regarding the visual design of the website.
We brainstormed specific words to describe our users, and came up with the following traits:
bold
fierce
strong
dynamic
These audience traits led us to decide that the content and interface of the site should reflect our audience members’ personality. For this reason, we chose to go with an intense, modern design using strong colors. We decided to avoid using typically feminine colors so that the design scheme would not seem expected or cliche. We also wanted to take into account the fact that our user base could include people who identified as non binary, since there was a chance that a feminine color scheme could be alienating.
High Fidelity Prototype
After taking into account the feedback from our research, I sketched wireframes. Then, I used Sketch to turn the wireframes into a high fidelity prototype that organized the website content into a clear, streamlined flow for users, and aligned with the users’ qualities. The updated layout made the site’s mission clear, highlighted the available salary and negation resources, and elevated the user experience.
This layout was a direct result of the insights we gained from our research, and the traits that described our audience.
To create this design, I used bold, saturated colors to reflect the site’s strong users. I added neon elements, including a sharp, angled image at the top, and a gradient near the bottom of the page for edginess.
For the hero section of the page, an image of a skylight acts as a visual representation of the glass ceiling that stops women from advancing in their careers. Statistics from our survey responses bookend the image, displaying the ramifications of the wage gap.
I added a quote carousel as an impactful way to share experiences women have had when trying to negotiate for higher pay.
A tools section allows users to easily find resources, with icons that tell them what to expect when they click.
Finally, a photo collage at the bottom of the page highlights the call to action, and shows users that they can join a network of like-minded professionals to gain support and allies.
Results
The final mockup took into account all of our content decisions, and resulted in a visually strong design. Moving forward, we can continue to iterate on this website as we uncover more insights, and find more content to incorporate. Eventually this resource could be launched, and become a working site that can be used to aid in the fight to close the gender wage gap.