Restructuring How People Find Help
An information architecture redesign for Catholic Charities of Chicago — turning a 4-step maze into a 2-tap path for people in urgent need.
Client:
Academic project, DePaul HCI 457
Category:
Information Architecture · UX Research
My Role:
UX Researcher — content inventory, tree testing, heuristic analysis, sitemap & annotations
Catholic Charities serves over 1 million people annually across Cook and Lake County, but its website buried critical services behind vague labels and 4+ click paths. For someone seeking senior care or veteran housing — often in urgent circumstances — that friction has real costs.
Over one quarter, our three-person team audited all 42 pages of the existing site, ran three rounds of card sorting and two rounds of tree testing with 16 participants, and conducted heuristic evaluations of the two lowest-performing user tasks. That research shaped the first redesigned flow, below: Rosa, a Spanish-speaking senior in Pilsen, can now reach senior care in two taps — with a language toggle, inline eligibility checklist, and a step-by-step application process replacing the 4-click path that scored 2.7/5 in our heuristic analysis.
What the data changed.
Behavioral evidence over assumptions — every structural decision traced back to a test result.
Tree testing improved directness from 63% to 72% between rounds, and single-word label changes produced measurable shifts: renaming "Cardinal's Council" to "Advisory Council" moved it from scattered across four categories to unanimous placement.
The second flow, below, tackles our hardest problem: veteran housing scored 1.3/5 for recognition — the lowest in the study — because veterans had no way to know the site served them. The redesign names Veteran Housing as its own sub-category, surfaces eligibility inline instead of buried in a PDF, and pairs every step with a phone fallback for users like Marcus, who needs proof an organization is legitimate before he'll engage.
My biggest takeaway: IA is slower and more evidence-heavy than it looks. We spent a full quarter building just enough research to justify a design direction — and that rigor is what made the recommendations defensible.
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