My senior project was done on the website “communityhelpnet.org”. Community Help Network is a non-profit organization that donates to the community in many ways, from their buddy bag program that sends low income children home with meals for the weekend, to a food pantry that teaches people about how to create a balanced and healthy diet. The project was brought to me by one of my future partners. The website was completely out of date and was very hard to navigate.
For this project I was the heuristic supervisor, meaning it was my job to make sure that all screens done across the entire project looked as though it was done by one person and not three individual people. I was also in charge of redesigning the donations screen, the board member screen, and the donation screen. I began my process by doing research on other nonprofits and to see how they did their donation screen and board members screen. The donation screen was the biggest aspect of the project, in my research I found that every nonprofit website had donation buttons all around the site and not just a donation screen.
To begin the process we created personas and tested a number of different people based on those personas. I was able to test five users on the website and each one of them came back with different results but the testing did confirm that the website was in need of an overhaul. Testing was done throughout the process of designing the screens from the low fidelity projects all the way until we were done completing the high fidelity prototypes. After testing the website for the last time we saw significant improvements in the website across the board.
The final design was done using the industry standard program “Figma”, the end result is a much more up to date website that is more streamlined and holds up to industry standards more than the previous side. I heavily based my designs on other non-profit websites and how they organized their content. The new board members screen had the largest improvement in my opinion, no more walls of text and leaves room for the board to grow. The donation screen is much more user friendly, previously the QR code didn’t work at all and users didn’t trust going to an external site, that is no longer an issue with the redesign.
This project was one of the most insightful and valuable ones I have ever done. I have done projects where you redesign screens without any testing but doing the full process of completely redesigning a website with just three people in three months was incredibly challenging and rewarding. I learned when to take a step back and access the work you’re doing from the user’s point of view and not from what you want to see. I also learned how to work within restraints of customers, there were things I wish I could have removed based on the users feedback however the organization insisted that it would be involved. I learned how to do the full process of designing a website from preliminary testing to see if there even is an issue, to a card sort to figure out what sections need to be involved in the website and what can be removed because users don’t see a need for it.