Eddy Chen
UIUX | Research | WordPress
A non-profit organization using urban agriculture to create sustainable and diverse food gardens to combat food insecurity in our community
I was responsible for conducting user research, redesign and development of the website to optimize aesthetics and user experience
Some Images are blurred due to NDA*
As EGC’s first designer, I was given a very broad context and task to redesign the ‘Outdated’ website.
Landing Page (before)
Volunteer Page (before)
Realizing only the content and design style can be ‘Outdated’, what can I do to make improvement to the users? I was able to quickly narrow down to the major problems of the website and prioritized the design tasks based on the user research.
After analyzing the old sites with other different non-profit organizations, I talked with 8 different stakeholders, including volunteers, donors, executive members, and general public to ensure both user and organizational goals were met. I found common themes during the research and generated insights around them.
Interviewing with one of the donors
Most of the non-profit organization focus on ‘People’ by showing group photos, target users, activities. The current website is lacking of showcases for who we are and what we do.
It is crucial to recognize our supports like donors and partners. Donors are generally not feeling rewarding for helping us.
“Donors only gets an email... ... they have no way to know their impact” - Fred, Donors
Non-profit organization tends to have too much information on the page and inconsistency of design.
Volunteers and donors need motivations to start their ‘job’. Motivations include things like benefit of volunteer, credibility of the organization, sense of community, impact, works done before.
Based on the research and gaining knowledge of my target users, I decided to focus on Volunteers, Donors because the insights from above suggest their impact to the organization. I created their user stories to define their needs on the website and guide me through the rest of the design process.
She is deciding if she wants to be a bolunteer for EGC and attend the next volunteer session. She wants to check next dates and register the event
He wants to know about this organization, such as what we do, and who we are. He could check different pages on the website, including landing page, past events, team members to find impact to the community.
I collaborated with 4 volunteers and 2 executive members in the organization to testing different user flows. I tried to keep fidelity low so they are not distracted by the design and pay attention to the usability.
Instead of putting meaningless pictures as old version, I chose images of past workdays that highlight of what we do to increase credibility and showcase of who we are.
'Your Impact' section allows donors to quickly decide on what amount they want to donate. Donors will likely to feel empathy because of this Image of children volunteer.
Educational resources are in the same place to avoid users spending more time on the website finding information.
For introducing team members, images are powerful and appealing than pure text, adding credibility and human aspects to the website.
To help with the maintain effort, I connected static data with our back-end platform which transits the data to Google Sheet and display live data.
Reflecting back to this internship, I appreciate the support from my supervisor Sandie. She helped me to recruit different stakeholders and synthesize research insights. I also have several takeaways to share.
Prioritization is a valuable skill especially when time is limited. I could take care of the important stakeholders first instead of getting lost in designing the whole website for all the stakeholders without focus.
It is okay for designers to say ‘No’ to other people in the team with reasons to support my decisions.
It is worth the time to play around in WordPress (or knowing what front-end dev can do) to decide the boundary of the design.
[Eddy] was able to successfully transformed the user interface of the website, streamlining fundraising, and volunteer registration process, updating educational resources through the website, significantly boosting user retention and organizational awareness in the community.”
