REDESIGNING & REBRANDING FOR LOCAL NONPROFIT

CREATABILITY

Framework: Designlab’s UX Academy

Timeline: 4 weeks

My Role: UX Design

Tools: Figma, Invision

THE PROBLEM:

Creatability is a local non-profit dedicated to teaching young children to be comfortable with adults with special needs and the elderly population through arts and crafts projects. Their current website is not responsive and can be frustrating to use when locating and signing up for a class. Their brand identity is also not reflective of the experience customers feel when taking a class.

THE SOLUTION:

Redesign their branding and website to be a fully responsive website, enabling their patrons to learn more about their unique mission and sign up for upcoming classes.

STEP ONE

RESEARCH

Goal: To identify demographics, trends and goals of Creatability’s target market

Process: Market Research, Competitive Analysis, Interviews

Research Goals:

  1. Determine the demographic of Creatability’s target patrons

  2. Determine the patrons’ needs, motivations, and frustrations

  3. Identify how patrons find Creatability

  4. Learn about other non-profits in the area that have similar missions

  5. Determine how patrons search for and sign up for crafting sessions

Methodologies:

Market research: To gain a better understanding and analyze trends of non-profits, inclusion, and crafting classes in the area

Competitive analysis: To identify and analyze Creatability’s direct and indirect competitors

User interviews: Meet with Creatability’s patrons and gain insight into their experiences, as well as to answer any questions not covered by secondary research.

Market Research

Because Creatability’s mission is so multi-faceted, I focused my research on non-profits, inclusion, and the crafting industry, as well as Creatability’s target demographic. This gave me valuable insight as to the needs and frustrations of the users I would be designing for. Below are some notable findings from my market research:

  • In 1986, schools were legally mandated to establish free and appropriate Special Education services to children ages 3-5 in the least restrictive environment as possible

  • In 1997, this law provided services for 565,000 children

  • By 2006, that number increased by 25%

  • Almost 1/4 of these children were served in a separate class

  • Hyper-personalization: Patrons seek firsthand connection with the organizations they interact with

  • Email: Accounts for 26% of online donor revenue, rising dramatically

  • Corporate giving: 58% of Americans consider a company’s social and environmental commitments when deciding where to work

  • Recurring giving: Monthly giving increased by 40% in 2017, and that number is expected to increase each year

  • Peer-to-peer fundraising: People so what they see others do

  • Impact transparency: Present-day donors have the research skills to investigate how their money is being utilized

  • 61% of grandparents take care of their grandkids on a regular basis. 12% are the primary caregiver.

  • Childcare costs in the US range from $5,000-$18,000 per year, which can be attributed to the large percentage of households relying on grandparents for childcare

  • Baby boomers give the most of any generation to charities, accounting for 41% of all contributions in 2017

  • 35% of boomers make contributions through charity websites. Some 27% give by mail, while 11% use social media websites to make contributions. 3% give via text messaging.

  • The top creative hobbies are edible arts (17%), painting and drawing (16%), kids crafts (16%), sewing and fabric (11%) and paper crafts (11%)

  • Crafting has been shown to improve children’s problem-solving skills, fine motor skills, creativity, self-esteem, memory, and socialization

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

Because Creatability is so unique in how it executes its mission, my competitive analysis focused on other local businesses and non-profits offering any sort of inclusion programming to the St. Louis area. This research showed me how Creatability could best position itself to be a strong contender within its local non-profit market, utilizing the strengths and avoiding the weaknesses found among its competitors.

Creatability Competitive Analysis

STEP TWO

DEFINE

Goal: To synthesize and analyze research findings

Process: Empathy Map, User Persona, Point of View Statements and How Might We Questions

EMPATHY MAP

To synthesize my findings from my interviews, I transcribed all my data and organized them into groups so that I could observe the common patterns and determine their insights and needs.

Insights

  • People find out about events, activities, and non-profits through friends

  • People participate in Creatability in order for their children to benefit from being exposed to those who are different from them

  • People expect to find class information on Creatability’s website

  • People get frustrated when classes seem disorganized

Needs

  • People need to have a platform to view friends’ local recommendations

  • People need to know the mission of Creatability

  • People need to be able to access updated class information

  • People need to know each class’s schedule

USER PERSONA

Based on my user research I crafted a user persona, personifying Creatability’s main target market: the Loving Grandma. Betty embodied the desire I found in my research of patrons to provide meaningful activities to their grandchildren by discovering and attending local events and activities. By creating Betty, I was able to reference her goals, needs, frustrations, and motivations so that I could better empathize with users during my design process.

Creatability User Persona

POINT OF VIEW STATEMENTS & HOW MIGHT WE QUESTIONS

After defining my target user, Betty, I moved on to translating my insights and needs to frame Betty’s point of view so that I can define the problems I am going to solve for. I then translated these point of view statements into “how might we questions…?” so that I can begin the ideation process.

Creatability Point of View and How Might We questions

STEP THREE

IDEATE

Goal: To brainstorm potential solutions, organization of content, and flows

Process: Product Roadmap, Sitemap, Task Flow, User Flow

PRODUCT ROADMAP

After generating HMW questions, I began to brainstorm various solutions to them that I could implement within my design. I then narrowed down those solutions and chose the features that would best address each question, taking into consideration practicality and impact on my users, as well as how critical each solution was to users meeting their goals. The roadmap helped me to focus on features that would solve for Betty’s needs.

SITE MAP

Once I got a better sense of my target market’s priorities, needs, and pain points, I was able to use that information to inform how to best organize Creatability’s website. I thought through how users would navigate the website, and how they would most easily accomplish the tasks that they hope to complete.

Creatability Site Map

TASK FLOWS

To demonstrate how Betty would interact with Cretability’s site, I created two task flows based on her needs to help define how she would go about learning about Creatability’s mission, as well as how she would sign up for a class. Creataing the task flows helped me visualize the customer experience, and to ensure that it was as usable and straightforward as possible.

USER FLOWS

To further analyze how Betty learn about Creatability’s mission and register for a class, I created a user flow to portray all potential paths she could take to completing her task. This allowed me to understand how pages should be organized based on its relationship with other pages, as well as to ensure that there were no unintentional dead ends within the site.

User Flow

STEP FOUR

DESIGN

Goal: To design Creatability’s brand and user interface

Process: Sketches, Branding, High-Fidelity Wireframes

SKETCHES

To begin the design process, I sketched out ideas for how I envisioned each page to be laid out. These sketches were based on existing design patterns I had seen, and included all of the page components that I had determined in my site map. Starting off with sketches allowed me to quickly lay down my ideas and gather feedback on my designs without investing too much time.

WIREFRAMES

As I went along the design process, I continued to fine-tune my designs to take into accounts user needs, usability, and current design trends. Most notably, Creatability’s homepage developed from its initial sketches with components of equal sizing and spacing, to a visually appealing homepage that utilized overlapping elements and large imagery.

Mid FIdelity Wireframes

LOGO & BRANDING

Once my research and wireframes gave me strong foundation of Creatability’s mission and brand attributes, I began to brainstorm how to translate those attributes into a visual direction. I developed a few keywords to describe Creatability’s brand (supportive, inclusive, unique, creative, and friendly) based on user interviews, Creatability’s mission, and the in-person feel that Creatability’s classes communicated, and used those as a foundation to guide my branding process.

STEP FIVE

prototype

Goal: To prototype Creatability’s site and to obtain feedback based on usability testing

Process: Mid-Fidelity Prototype, Usability Testing

mid-fidelity prototype

In order to see how users interact with Creatability’s site, I created a functioning mid-fidelity prototype using Figma and InVision. This allowed me to test the structure of the site without any distractions from visual elements.

USABILITY TESTING

To determine the ease of use of Creatability’s site, I conducted in-person usability tests using my mid-fidelity prototype on 5 participants in a similar age category as my persona, Betty. I was able to gather insightful feedback based on observation of my target users. It is only when my designs have been validated and improved based on user testing that I can say I truly accomplished my goal.

Objectives:

  1. Observe how users navigate throughout the website

  2. Determine if users seem to easily be able to complete their tasks

  3. Identify areas of the prototype that seem to cause confusion and need improvement

User Tasks:

  1. Navigate through the site to learn about Creatability’s mission.

  2. Identify which class is being offered on your available date (Monday, October 21).

  3. Register yourself and your 1 year-old grandchild to attend the class.

STEP SIX

ITERATE

Goal: To update my designs based on common patterns found in usability testing

Process: Affinity Map, Revisions

AFFINITY MAP & REvisions

My usability testing revealed a few key findings. I organized the trends, themes, and areas of opportunity for discovery and improvement based on usability testing on the Affinity Map.

Affinity Map

Based on this feedback, I established two main insights and recommendations:

Insights

  1. Users did not realize that they needed to scroll past the hero image on each page

  2. Users were unsure of whether their registration was submitted successfully

Recommendations

  1. Make the hero image smaller on each page

  2. Relabel the confirmation page as “Confirmation”

reflection & next steps

Next Steps

  • Further testing my final revisions to ensure that my solutions were successful in solving users’ initial frustrations and stated areas for improvement

  • Hand-off to developers

  • Look into additional features:

    • Share events with friends

    • Online donation

Final Thoughts

  • My main goals were to establish a responsive website, as well as to develop branding and a logo for Creatability

  • Throughout the design process, from researching, defining, ideating, designing, prototyping, and iterating, I was able to accomplish these goals

  • I enjoyed referencing pre-existing design patterns, as well as utilizing design software to incorporate current design trends into the re-design.