Southern Door Community Land Trust
The Southern Door Community land trust or SDCLT is a nonprofit organization that is lead by a board of community representatives that promote shared equity home ownership for families, developing urban and rural agriculture projects, and ensuring that new developments remain permanently affordable for generations of low income families.
Goal: Develop a complete redesign of the current website with an emphasis on creating a more trustworthy and professional donation system to increase contributions.
Duration
2024
Role
UX Designer UX Researcher
Members
Solo Member
Toolkit Figma Figjam Adobe Illustrator
Background
In college, I sought a project that combined design with community service. After researching local organizations, my roommate suggested redesigning her employer’s website. This led me to the Southern Door Community Land Trust, where I identified several issues, particularly with broken navigation tabs and redundant pages that caused a frustrating user experience. After discussing these problems with the Executive Director, we agreed I would lead the website redesign.
Desktop Prototype
Research Goals
Before I began my research I first identified some research milestones:
Conduct extensive research on what is a community land trust
Identifying pros and cons of other community land trust
Understanding key issues within the current platform
Empathize
Google Survey
The first step of my research strategy was to interview the non-for profit director to figure out what direction did she want to take the website. From our meeting, we decided on giving the website a modern aesthetic and increasing online donations would be a primary focus. Next, I utilized Google Forms to survey some local acquaintances of the community to understand donation habits. In just three days I received over 20 submissions.
Overview
Some questions asked during this interview were:
How often do you donate?
If you rarely or don't donate online, why do you choose not to?
What would make you more likely to donate online?
When donating online what website do you feel the most comfortable using and why?
Questions
12/20 Participants were less likely to donate due to confusion on where exactly donations would be going.
8/20 felt navigating a cluttered website with several design inconsistencies created feelings of unease.
9/20 felt there was a noticeable pattern of participants wanting the donation process to feel less transactional and more personable.
Results
Donation Habits Data
Research Insights
After collecting my data, I sorted the responses into three categories: Trust, Navigation, and Bond.
From my testing pool, I discovered that my older participants have been scammed and needed reassurance of online credibility.
Trust
“I don’t donate online because I am unsure if my money will be going to the right places.”
For a majority of my users, at some point they struggled accessing certain tabs due to faulty links and even dropped off early.
Navigation
“Sharing my information is scary and sometimes I don't trust the website.”
There was a common theme among users who wanted their donation experience to feel more lively and less transactional.
Bond
“If donating was more personable, I would be more inclined to do it.”
Personas
Based off of my survey, I created two personas that captured the common pain points I viewed. From my personas, I gained a better understanding of goals and issues that I would go on to utilize as a reference for my design decisions.
Define and Ideate
Defining the Problem
After collecting and synthesizing my data I was left with two big problems to solve:
How might we earn the trust of users that their donations will be spent where they intended for it to be used?
How might we make the process of donating feel more personable and less transactional?
Competitive Analysis
I first began my process with a competitive analysis to better understand how do competitors tackle these same issues, what I could learn from it, and how I could improve upon it. After analyzing the competitions strengths and weaknesses I gained a better understanding of how these platforms tackled similar pain points.
Figure 3: Competitive Analysis Chart
Brainstorming Solutions
From my competitive analysis process amongst direct competitors and browsing indirect competitors websites such as GoFundMe and Charity Water I was able to think of possible solutions such as:
Adding an accessibility-friendly pop-up that will appear at the end of the homepage to encourage users to sign up for the newsletter to address transparency and being personable critiques
Giving the user transparent control over their donations by choosing where exactly they would like to send their funds
Figure 3: Possible Solutions Chart
Prioritization
After listing possible solutions I needed to list which features would be a priority. In my process, I utilized a Vinn-Diagram to clearly understand the needs of the organization and their users. After reinforcing my goals, I created an Impact-Effort Matrix for my solutions to show which would be feasible and worthwhile for its effort.
Figure 4: Vinn-Diagram
Figure 5: Impact-Effort Matrix
Information Architecture
My sitemap process was straight to the point. I kept the same navigation buttons but decided to swap out Upcoming Events with a Get Involved page. The reasoning behind this was due to the confusion users would experience scouring through the website looking to volunteer. Then, I decided to instead add the Upcoming Events section to the homepage in order to immediately grap the users attention.
Before
Unorganized navigation
News section is hidden in “More” tab that you need to dig for
Unclear where volunteer options are
No clear definition of what a community land trust is
After
Information divided by tabs based on volunteer opportunity and old projects to help users find opportunities quicker
Upcoming events and information moved to homepage in order to quickly inform users of events instead of digging for information
Provides clarification on what exactly a community land trust on the homepage
Prototype and Test
Low-Fidelity Wireframes
I created a collection of low-fidelity wire frames to have a skeletal lay-out for my designs. My goal was to focus on functionality before incorporating visuals.
Usability Test
Before I started crafting my high-fidelity prototype, I held an unmoderated usability testing session with the organizations development associate and an unconnected third-party.
Test Objectives
How well can they traverse the website with no issues
Observe different paths users take to complete tak
Results
After conducting my usability test with my two participants, I received invaluable feedback on two pages with major critiques: my donation and homepage.
Home Page
Both felt that the homepage was a bit lack-luster and the associate felt that their needed to be more emphasis on the goal of receiving more donations or joining their newsletter
“The home-page is a little basic and I think we can improve upon this if we added something about being able to donate.
Task
Try to complete a donation interaction
Head to our volunteer page and sign up
Visit all navigation tabs
Donation Page
The development associate felt that due to their target demographic being older they wouldn’t feel comfortable inputting their information and wanted that component removed.
“Unfortunately, we will need to take out the card information section because our target demographic are typically older and aren’t tech savvy.”
Priority Revisions
After receiving feedback on my wireframes, I began to focus on iterations on my homepage and donation page first.
Home Page
Revised prototype solves problem of a lack-luster homepage by adding elements such as an upcoming events section and learn more tab. The donation problem is also fixed by giving users call-to-actions to donate.
Revised prototype solves previous issue by sending user to trusted platform Zeffy. I also gave users even more control of their money by allowing users to specifically choose where they would like their money to go.
Donation Page
High-Fidelity Wireframes
When designing my prototype I first picked out my primary, secondary, and accent colors based off of the organizations brand identity. With the new branding defined, I built my high-fidelity prototype off of my revised wireframes.
Reflections
1. Looking back, instead of just relaying on my Google survey, I should’ve also conducted a usability test to receive direct feedback on what the typical user would want fixed or maintained from the original website.
3. Having such a big participant pool was helpful in gaining valuable insights, but most of the participants I used weren’t familiar with the Southern Door Community Land Trust. It would’ve been better to incorporate core followers to understand what long standing pain points they’ve dealt with.
2. After completing my high-Fidelity prototype, I should’ve conducted a final usability test with animations to get final confirmation that my design is fully functional which will allow me to focus on any extreme issues.
4. I would focus on keeping on my key performance indicators by implementing Pendo.io to keep track of my drop-off rates in order to see how well my donation solution worked.