Newsome-Bailey
My Responsibilities:
User Research
Content Strategy
Low/Mid Fidelity Wireframing
UI Design
Timeline:
February 2021 - July 2021
My Impact:
Increased monthly user engagement through volunteering and donations with website by 64%
Overview
Newsome-Bailey is an educational nonprofit organization based in Newport News, VA made up of therapists, tutors, and volunteers who’s mission is to positively impact underserved children to nurture their academic, emotional, and physical health for the future.
I was brought on as a one-team Designer to redesign the website with the goal of increasing online engagement of both volunteers and donors with the organization.
Some of my achivements included:
Facilitating 4 remote interviews and card sorting exercises. This helped me better understand the perspective of the people who would be utilizing this website in the future.
Presenting deliverables to stakeholders weekly. To include stakeholders into my process, it was important that I share deliverables with them on a weekly basis (competitive analysis results, wireframes, user interview findings, etc.)
Increasing monthly user engagement through volunteering and donations by 64%. Because of my redesign, the nonprofit organization saw a marked increase in people who wanted to engage with Newsome-Bailey through their website.
Before Images
The website consisted of a single page with a couple of images and broken links.
Competitive Analysis
I started my redesign process by looking at the websites of other educational nonprofit organizations, with the goal of noting both aspects that could be emulated and aspects that could be improved upon.
User Interviews
I conducted 4 remote, moderated interviews with people who had different responsibilities within the organization to understand their motivations and how my redesign could meet their needs. I also included a hybrid card sorting exercise to see how they grouped certain concepts together in regards to the structure and layout of the website.
There was the highest percentage of agreement (75%) about which terms fit into the “Donate” category, suggesting that the concepts around donations were viewed the most similarly amongst the four participants.
To organize the qualitative information from the interviews, I grouped them into categories through affinity mapping. Some of the trends I found included:
NILD Therapy was frequently attributed as the reason why Newsome-Bailey is so effective at educating children.
All interviewees mentioned a strong desire for websites that were clear and simple to navigate.
People within the organization were all motivated by similar intrinsic values to foster the long term growth of children.
With the insights from both the Competitive Analysis and the User Interviews, I decided that my priorities in the redesign would be:
Including a consistent color palette/typography, as well as clear Call to Actions to encourage Donations and Volunteering
Making the website simple to navigate, but comprehensive enough to fit the needs of the different types of site visitors
Information Architecture
I designed User Flows to analyze how the layout of the website could help the two highest priority demographic of users (Donors and Volunteers) achieve their objectives.
After having an understanding of what pages I wanted to include, I then created a sitemap to holistically lay out the structure and framework of the website.
I then went on to create mid-fidelity wireframes, thinking big picture about the layout and formatting of the different pages. The majority of the copy and content to fill out the pages came from a PDF document that the organization had already created.
Style Guide
It was important to me that the design of the website communicated the personality of the organization in embodying the joy and fulfillment that comes with nourishing a child’s physical and mental development. I chose to express this through standardizing the colors and the typography throughout the website.
Final Website Redesign
Ultimately, I enjoyed the process of evolving the site from a single homepage to a comprehensive resource that addressed different site visitor’s needs. The redesign drove up monthly online user engagement by 64%.
Some reflections on what I would have done differently:
Talk to more than 4 users. I believe talking to even more users could have given me more conclusive insights to inform my design decisions.
Spend more time refining the UI Design. While I liked the color palette and typography I chose, I think I could have included a bit more macrospace between different elements throughout the website.
Reflections
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