WEBSITE REDESIGN

Redesign the website for “Helping You Community Forum”, a non-profit based in Karonga, Malawi.

Overview
The manager of HCFY contacted UX Rescue seeking support to redesign the website for “Helping You Community Forum”, a non-profit based in Karonga, Malawi formed on April 24, 2020.

My Role

For this project, I worked with a team of 3 other UX design volunteers. 
I was the Project Manager along with a teammate and led the UX efforts including the stakeholder interview, heuristic evaluation & content audit of the existing website and the usability test/ cognitive walkthrough with 5 targeted users.
We collaborated on research, ideation, discussion, and implementation of the refined user experience.

The Challenge

While HYCF has successfully created an organization for locals especially youths to seek help and learn about income generating initiatives, our challenge was to explore different ways we could spread the word further and help with fundraising efforts.
We wanted the new website to essentially help establish trust and confidence in HYCF, increase awareness, and ultimately empower individuals to get involved.

The Approach

To better understand the problem, we worked on a research plan, outlining the research goals and objectives for this project. Then we discussed what research methods would be best to meet these objectives:

A. pre-interview survey

We decided to start with a Pre-Interview Survey to get some basic questions to the stakeholder that he can answer before the stakeholder interview. That way we could concentrate on fewer questions but have more in-depth conversations during the interview.

I started with compiling questions for a short pre-interview survey. My main goal was to start the conversation with the stakeholder and get a basic idea of his motivations and goals.

B. Stakeholder Interview

Next step was the stakeholder interview. I worked on a moderator script with input from my fellow colleagues and then conducted the stakeholder interview.

The 3 main objectives for the interview were

• Learn more about the organization, their vision, needs, and context

• Identify their activities, limitations & resources, and scope.

• Set up expectations about the upcoming process, especially on research. (most important!)

C. Empathy Map

After the interview, we conducted a brainstorming session digging deeper into the primary stakeholders motivations, goals and frustrations with the help of an empathy map.

We were able to define 3 primary business needs:

1. Improve peoples’ understanding and awareness surrounding HCFY
2. Help with fundraising efforts
3. Increase contributions and engagement with volunteers and donors on an international level

It was getting clearer that we wanted to re-design the current HCYF website to improve people’s understanding and increase awareness surrounding the organization. We also wanted to integrate a fundraising page and help with recruitment of international volunteers and donors.

D. More In-depth research

Since we were 4 UX Designers and Researchers on the team, we decided to do a very thorough research and completely understand the users and their motivations and frustrations before jumping to any design/ conclusions.

Each of us picked one research method and approached the problem. I worked on the content audit and the heuristic evaluation.

E. content audit

I looked at the website to determine their existing areas of focus and what could be improved to address both business and user needs. I found that overall the website had lots of information but was not really catering to their target audience.

The biggest problem was the way to donate/ volunteer. The links are hidden and I honestly just stumbled across them because I was conducting this content audit. I could see volunteers and donors being very frustrated to find these links to be so buried.

I identified several issues that might discourage an individual from getting involved including:

1. An inefficient donation process

2. Limited ways to volunteer

3. A lack of evidence showing the impact that HYCF has made and the impact you can have as an individual

F. Heuristic Evaluation

After that I conducted a heuristic evaluation for the existing website based on Jacob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics. 

The website uses very informal and basic english which is easy to understand but is very inconsistent with font types and spacing between lines of texts. There are a lot of pictures throughout to communicate with the user and give more information as to what is being communicated. However there is no hierarchy distinguishing between more important and less important features.

One big area of improvement would be simplifying the journey for a volunteer or a donor and adding a FAQ section. Keeping the target audience in mind, it is confusing for the volunteers to find the volunteer button and for the donors the donate button and the button can currently be easily missed, if one is not paying attention.

G. Competitive Analysis

We ran a competitive analysis of 5 websites of non-profit organizations to better understand the market and what is working and what is not.

The main takeaways were

1. Clearly state the mission & story of the organization.

2. Have a clear navigation bar at the top. Donations/ volunteering options has to be highlighted.

3. Consistency of layout suggests reliability and organization.

4. Impact of volunteering must be clearly stated to increase volunteering chances.

5. The experiences created should be mobile friendly.

H. Unmoderated Usability Testing

To gain a better understanding of how we could more effectively address this problem, we conducted a series of unmoderated cognitive walkthroughs on the existing website. We measured success rates and how long participants needed to complete the tasks.

Research Synthesis

A. User Archetypes

Based on the patterns identified in our secondary research, we came up with two primary user archetypes:

The Volunteer: Someone who is curious about HYCF and wants to volunteer with the organization.

The Donor: Someone who is curious about HYCF, doesn’t have the time but wants to donate and help the organization.

B. User Journey Mapping

In order to visualize the current website experience from the user’s perspective, I created a series of user journey maps. I wanted these journey maps to illustrate potential scenarios where a user might interact with the website.

Learnings

Always have a schedule!
There were times where the project dragged a little due to not having a deadline for artifacts. A timeline and plan always keeps you on schedule and makes sure that things don’t take longer than what they need.