People Helping People Case Study
GOAL
Working on a team with two other designers, I researched and designed a compelling, user-focused interface based on user research with a clear, meaningful brand identity that encourages trust, resulting in increased donations to People Helping People, a nonprofit organization.
BACKGROUND
People Helping People is a long-term employment program for low-income women and single mothers.
Their organization provides:
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1-on-1 mentoring
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Educational workshops
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Resume and interview prep
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Job fairs and seminars
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Job placement through corporate partnerships
Defining Agency Objectives
A meeting with PHP’s executive director clarified the agency’s purpose and helped us discover the goals for their website, which we used as our North Star to guide our design direction.
The agency needs its website to attract and engender trust in more donors to continue serving its clientele and expand its reach.
USER INTERFACE ANALYSIS
We got to work conducting a website audit to assess the current site’s branding, usability, and functionality and highlight the issues we would need to consider in the redesign. We identified several challenges: aesthetics, clarity, color palette, information architecture, and text overload.
Digging deeper, we evaluated the website’s efficacy within four key heuristics categories.
It failed three of them.
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In the redesign, we clearly need to prioritize aesthetics, make content easily accessible, and fine-tune the website’s functionality.
Defining Our Users
PERSONAS
Our research led us to define four main personas affiliated with this organization:
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Individual Donors
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Corporate Donors
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Corporate Partners
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Program Clients
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We decided to focus on individual donors​ because we believed that increasing the number of donations made through their website would help the organization reach its financial goals. Later, we found that fewer but larger monetary donations and sponsorships from companies might have been more effective in reaching the donation goals of People Helping People.
USER SURVEY
We sent out a social media survey asking users about their current attitudes and behaviors toward donating to nonprofit organizations.
Takeaway: Highlight how PHP is impacting the local community; take users on a journey to elicit trust.
USER INTERVIEWS
It was time to see what impressions the current website gave users; the results were pretty dismal. It took users so long to figure out what the organization actually did, that most said they’d abandon the search. Using words like “sketchy” and “questionable,” nearly everyone stated that they wouldn’t trust this organization based solely on its website.
Our users need to trust that People Helping People is a legitimate, credible agency in order to feel secure enough to donate.
Ideating, Testing & Prototyping
OUR USER'S JOURNEY
Knowing our users’ needs, we developed the ideal scenario that would motivate our users to trust People Helping People enough to donate, then sketched out what that journey might look like.
WIREFRAMING
For our wireframing, we integrated the best ideas from each designer's sketches into one cohesive direction. Guided by our restructured sitemap, we sectioned off our homepage into clear categories, with the option to expand those sections for additional information.
Can users ascertain the purpose of the site within 5 seconds?
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Can users access important, relevant information quickly and easily?
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Can users quickly and easily make a donation?
100%
HI-FI DESIGN
We refreshed the PHP brand using clean fonts, simple imagery, and a bright, friendly color palette to create a clear, modern aesthetic. Our mood board and logo redesign informed our final style guide.
USER TEST + CARD SORT
We asked our testers to evaluate the order of the sections in our prototype and then to do their own card sort with those sections, arranging each in a way they felt told the most compelling story.
While each tester ordered the sections slightly differently, we saw a pattern in categorization and adjusted accordingly.
People Helping People 2.0
HEURISTIC RETEST
A final comparison heuristic test reflected a significant improvement from our initial findings.
Results
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Improved site heuristics by at least 45% over three categories.
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100% of users passed the 5-second test and could quickly complete a donation on their first visit.
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Users were more willing to trust PHP based on the improved aesthetic and professionalism of the site.
Next Steps
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Retest, reiterate and refine.
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Piggyback off of the research and design of the Individual Donor flow to begin the Corporate Donor flow, followed by the Community Partnership flow.
Key Learnings
Sometimes, the best direction won’t fit the timeline.
While corporate donors offered the most potential for big donation money, we focused on the individual donor first because we knew we had access to resources that would yield research results that fit our timeline.
Prioritizing within given parameters is key to creating successes you can build on.
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Design for moments
Designing for moments by capturing and observing our users’ emotional journeys provided me with the space to interpret, understand, and add meaning to their experiences.
When designing products, we lean toward a frictionless flow that removes impediments to immediate action and focuses on increasing conversion at all costs. This approach doesn’t consider the deeper story of how we can design and build experiences that are also enriching and fulfilling for members of the People Helping People community and website users.