Our research journey began with deep dives into policy, systems, and everyday realities—evolving through multiple phases of stakeholder engagement, assumption testing, and iterative learning. By mapping the complexities of the WIC ecosystem and surfacing gaps across touchpoints, we identified real opportunities to design for clarity, care, and lasting impact.
This mix of qualitative and strategic methods helped us map the ecosystem, test assumptions, and inform every layer of our solution.
Before meeting our client, we dove into background research to orient ourselves in the world of WIC and WICANYS. We reviewed the WICANYS website, studied the New York State grant narrative, analyzed survey responses, and explored benchmark organizations. Every insight was documented to help us start asking the right questions, even when the boundaries were still unclear.
We quickly learned that this problem wasn’t linear. It sat at the intersection of advocacy, access, communications, and care. With a complex network of stakeholders and layers of federal constraints, we were operating in a space where there exists the statement, “we didn’t know what we didn’t know.”
Our kickoff meeting was a crucial moment to compare mental models with the WICANYS team. What did they see as the problem? Where were their pain points most deeply felt? This knowledge transfer revealed important nuances about the system's bottlenecks and opportunities. Together, we built tools like a stakeholder map and a problem matrix to break down the what, who, how, and why.
We learned that WICANYS sits in a delicate position: acting as a connector between agencies, participants, and legislators—without always having the tools to streamline those conversations.
We synthesized information from our background research and stakeholder meetings and formulated five core needs of the client:
Two core challenges became the focus of our design:
Improve the website to support the larger system of WICANYS
Expand advocacy efforts through enhanced tools and processes
Across think-aloud experiments, analogous research, stakeholder conversations, and national-level observations, we uncovered consistent patterns that shaped the foundation of our design. These insights confirmed, challenged, and sharpened our early assumptions.
WICANYS needs clearer audience targeting and information structure, as users struggled to understand its mission or relevance, highlighting that effective advocacy requires tailored messaging, distinct audiences, and clearly framed content.
Federal and judicial developments add pressure to act now, before windows close. Legislative strategy is nuanced: data must be paired with emotion, and timing is everything.
As WIC services shift remote, many local agencies reported the erosion of in-person warmth and emotional trust. Personal relationships—built through greetings, hugs, and familiar faces—were cited as essential for building belonging.
Insights from the NWA conference reinforced our findings and gave us face-to-face opportunities to speak with WIC staff, board members, and vendors—providing deeper understanding of advocacy pain points, as well as a glimpse into who within the WIC ecosystem is already poised to be strong advocates, if given the right support.
Our research established a foundation for continued investigation and solution development:
Continuing the stage of focused exploration towards participants, subject matter experts, and key roles, that aim to seek possible design solutions.
Rapidly developing, designing, and creating artifacts to explore, test, and refine ideas with real users.
Cycling through quick experiments and artifacts testing to challenge hypotheses and preexisting notions, moving towards a strong solution concept.