Building a nonprofit website
ROLE
UX Designer
Skills
Figma,
Information Architecture
organization
Design Co
at UCSD
Timeline
12 Weeks,
Summer 2024
OVERVIEW
Who Did I Work With?
This summer, I participated in UCSD Design Co's summer program, a 10-week internship program that gives students the opportunity to work for a local non profit to elevate their branding and exposure. This summer, me and 7 other students, were paired with the local nonprofit SAY San Diego.
We were tasked with working with San Diego Military Family Collaborative (SDMFC), an associated program whose goal is to organize resources for military families in San Diego. The initial task we were given was to redesign their website and implement a simpler Content Management System for our stakeholders. Let's explore how this task evolved.
research
Diving Deeper Into Our Initial Tasks
After being assigned our goals, my team and I immediately got started. As we were initially evaluating the website, we immediately ran into some big problems. We noticed that it was difficult to locate content on the website. Why were there two search bars?
On top of that, it was clear that the visual design was consistently, inconsistent. There were a variety of buttons and discrepancies between hyperlinks. Constant use of bolded text made it difficult for users to discern what was important.
After doing our initial evaluation of the website, we got to researching the user base to see what users, as well as our stakeholders were struggling with.
understanding our users: What is a member?
But first, who were actually the users of the website? We were told by our stakeholders that "members" were the main users of the website. But there was difficulty understanding the jargon they were using.
After coming across this issue, we immediately consulted our stakeholders to get clearer definitions on who our user base was. Through this, we pinned down four key user groups.
After nailing down our definition and fully understanding who used the SDMFC website, we got to surveying the user base.
user surveys
As a designer, I was used to just immediately getting survey responses, but for this project, we were working on the timeline of SDMFC, meaning we had to wait for our stakeholders to release the survey during their monthly meeting, and then waiting for more survey responses to roll in.
Despite not having direct access to users initially, the other UX Designer and I took advantage of industry research and UX standards to identify key areas for improvement.
We conducted a Heuristic Evaluation on the entire website, as well as a market analysis while awaiting survey responses to get a deeper understanding of the issue at hand.
The solution
After consolidating our key findings from our research, we came to 3 main solutions we believed would help with SDMFC's goal.
Ideation
designing and implementing concurrently
Because we were working on such a tight deadline, my team and I had to design and implement on Wix Studio concurrently in order to ensure timely completion of the project.
Additionally, we were working through different levels of fidelities concurrently as well. All throughout, we were in constant communication with our stakeholders, meeting with them every week to update them on our progress.
Usability Testing
As we were wrapping up and right before our launch, our UX Researcher conducted usability testing on the 5 people he conducted initial interviews on. We saw a 78% decrease in time needed to find information!
Final Product
Our deliverables
And with that, here is what we ultimately delivered to SDMFC!
a cohesive design system
Content reorganization
Simplified Workflows for Stakeholders
reflection
What did I learn?
One of the biggest lessons I learned was adapting to change. One of the biggest roadblocks we encountered was waiting for user research. Since our survey responses were dependent on SDMFC releasing it to their community, we had to push everything back while awaiting responses.
Instead of letting the delay our progress, I shifted my focus to areas of the project that didn’t rely on the survey responses. I took the opportunity to, as mentioned earlier, conduct a heuristic evaluation and beginning sketching potential solutions based off that. This helped me ensure that when the user data finally came in, I was ready to integrate it efficiently and make the most of the insights we gathered.
Thank you!
Thank you so much to my team, as well as to SDMFC for this opportunity! This seriously could not have been completed without the support of my fellow peers, as well as mentor!
