Client
Role: Digital Designer
Client: Make-A-Wish LA
Team: Digital Designer (Me) and Director of Marketing
Platform
iOS, Android
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
Background
Make-A-Wish Greater Los Angeles is a premier child wish-granting organization and operates with Make-A-Wish America and other chapters. Make-A-Wish Greater Los Angeles recently updated their branding and wanted to update its website’s homepage. My role was to design a homepage that would attract potential donors.
Goal
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Outcome
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Gathering Context
Before doing anything else, I did as much competitive and secondary research as possible. In my initial research there were four things that stood out on competitors’ websites:
Homepages had a clear user journey.
Homepages were scannable.
Homepages had clear “Call to Actions.”
Homepages had great SEO.
To follow up, I went ahead and did some research utilizing Google Analytics to see how the website was performing, right from the time a user lands on the homepage to when a user exits. This definitely showed some pain points users had in completing tasks.
In order to gain more insights into the users I was designing for, I went ahead and interviewed donors from our donor segmentation project we had done months before this project. After, I went ahead and synthesized notes into an affinity map and then gathered those insights into creating user personas.
Design Objectives
There are some pain points that came up while interviewing users:
Lack of event information on the homepage.
Inability to find wish stories and volunteer stories.
The homepage does not look family-friendly.
Based on the insights I gathered from user research, I sketched an initial wireframe and imported it into Invision. I sought out five users for usability testing. Based on feedback, I implemented changes that ranged from minor to major and then sought out five new users to test again.
Once our analytics and testing showed satisfaction, I created a high-fidelity prototype utilizing the Make-A-Wish Branding requirements to allow the engineers to inspect the file and export the HTML and CSS code.
Prototype
Future Opportunities
After the redesign of the homepage was concluded, I went ahead and redesigned other pages following the same process that I implemented for this project.