Two-week three people group project to redesign the webpage of a nonprofit organization.
To successfully redesign the World Resources Institute's website, we followed the design process as below, consisting of user research to empathize with our potential users, defining the focus of WRI,prototyping and testing the website flow,and consistently improving it.
In order to empathize with our users, we conducted research in the forms of surveys and interviews. Our goal was to figure out how people feel and how much people know about climate change.
Through our interviews we wanted to dive deeper into their knowledge of environmental issues and their potential motivations to donate to an organization. As a result, we found that people desire to be more informed of environmental issues in order to be inspired to donate to a non-profit organization.
Out of the 20 survey respondents, 70% strongly agree with the statement “I care a lot about the environment”. However, out of the same respondents, 60% also disagree with the statement “I know a lot about what affects the environment”.
Essentially, people are concerned about the environment but are not very knowledgable on what directly affects it.
Through interviews and surveys, we learned that people are aware of climate issues but essentially feel helpless when it comes to taking action. Although many people take individual actions to be more environmentally friendly, they are unaware of how to take further action.
Our user persona, Michelle, feels strongly to fight for environmental issues. She takes individual actions such as using tote bags, reusable water bottles, recycling, and driving a Prius, as well as regularly reading articles to stay informed.
She wants to take it a step further and contribute to improve the state of the environment.
In our storyboard, Michelle goes on a business trip to China and is overwhelmed by its pollution. While looking for ways to help the environment on a global level, she learns about World Resources Institute and introduces it to her company to support the organization.
Because we thought that the navigation bar is crucial to grab Michelle’s attention to learn more about WRI, we established a new navigation hierarchy with a sitemap.
We drew quick sketches of the pages we wanted to create based on our user flow. It consists of focusing on WRI's numerous projects by highlighting them continuously.
Before creating the style guide, we first collaborated on creating a moodboard to define the overall atmosphere we wanted for the website. Using that, we continued the process by developing the final style guide that best represents the minimal and modern feel Michelle would be driven towards.
Since this project was heavily focused on the design aspect, I was initially worried about how to unify three different styles of three individuals into one website. By working on the moodboard and style guide together, (and with continuous communication) we successfully created one flow of the re-design.
The great thing about WRI is that they is an abundance of information. Therefore, there are numerous pages that still need to be designed to spread the message.
Another idea we had for the WRI website is to incorporate social media onto the homepage. With it, there could be various challenges targeted towards helping the environment, such as the #trashtag challenge that recently went viral.