Historically, the American Heart Association has received great engagement and support from older populations and elementary school children (Kid's Heart Challenge). However, there is a steep drop off for middle schoolers, high schoolers, and people in the early adult life stage. My main responsibility at the American Heart Association was to reexamine past data and uncover trends for GenZ and early adulthood life stage individuals. To accomplish this goal, I used MarketSight and SPSS to parse through the data points and conduct statistical analyses. My findings were presented to the Office of the CEO team and may be used to guide future marketing decisions.

My other responsibilities included designing surveys in Qualtrics for other departments, participating in vendor calls from external marketing research firms, reviewing current research projects from student consulting groups, and attending market research conferences in the DFW area. My role also allowed me to collaborate and meet people from other departments. As an intern, I also worked with other interns for a group project which is discussed in more depth below.

As part of this internship, I collaborated with a few other interns on a group project that was presented to AHA leadership in late April 2023. The project focused on the American Heart Challenge, which encourages middle schoolers and high schoolers to engage with the AHA through spreading awareness and raising funds. The goal of the project was to provide recommendations that will motivate these students to become involved in the program.

My team decided to focus on a two-part presentation. The first half focused on harnessing the power of social media, specifically TikTok, to spread awareness of the program through viral challenges. The second half involved redesigning the website for the American Heart Challenge to create an informative and efficient sign-up process in order to eliminate user pain points. I volunteered to head this portion, as I had previous experience with UX design and Figma.

When we began this project, we viewed the existing website for the American Heart Challenge (above). We had some difficulty understanding what the challenge actually consisted of and found it hard to use the search bar to find a participating school. Additionally, the visual design choices felt dated and inconsistent in some areas. From our own experience of using the website, we imagined other visitors may face the same struggles we did. So, we decided it was important to redesign some key pages to remove the pain points we felt. Here were the three opportunities for improvements we decided to move forward with.

With these goals in mind, I began designing in Figma. Since this project aimed to encourage more middle schoolers and high schoolers to participate in the American Heart Challenge, I narrowed my focus on two pages: the Homepage and the For Students page.

For the homepage, I cleaned up the navigation bar and rearranged the "Glow with Heart" hero image to show at the top of the page. This will help users understand the general idea of the American Heart Challenge immediately. From there, I added some more information about the challenge along with a refined version of the collage. There are three cards which target different user groups that would be interested in the challenge and below that, I included links to AHA's social media pages for quick access. As for the sign up process, I inserted a map feature which can be used to locate schools near the user. Additionally, I allowed users to use their zip code within the search bar to make the process easier. Finally, for students whose schools are not participating in the American Heart Challenge this year, I included a section to join Finn's team. Prior to my redesign, the link for Finn's team could be easily missed.

The "For Students" page was extremely bare on the original design. Prior to designing, my team and I imagined ourselves as potential students wanting to participate in the American Heart Challenge and viewed the website. A major takeaway was that the "For Students" page was not helpful at all. With this in mind, I set out to alleviate the issues. For aesthetic purposes, I added a header image and a legible and properly spaced title. From there, I pulled information from multiple other pages and combined them into a simple explanation of the American Heart Challenge. Students should be able to find the answers they want quickly with the descriptive headings. Lastly, I cleaned up the cards for various resources relevant to the challenge and added a video section titled "Keep active with AHA".

You can see the final designs below. Along with our social media portion, we presented our recommendations to AHA's top leadership. We received great feedback and praise for our design choices and our design updates may be implemented in the future.