Challenge
Build a new efficient website that speaks to the foundation’s clients’ needs, measures user traffic, and promote events.
My Role
UX Strategy and CMS Developer Using Joomla
Project Time
5 weeks
Tools
XD, Illustrator, Lucidchart, Joomla
Build a new efficient website that speaks to the foundation’s clients’ needs, measures user traffic, and promote events.
UX Strategy and CMS Developer Using Joomla
5 weeks
XD, Illustrator, Lucidchart, Joomla
The brand manager wanted to modernize the image of the nonprofit by focusing on the young audience. By creating a fun website, promote new services, and inform users about all different activities and events that will be taking place in the organization. The site should be a tool to connect donors, volunteers, business partners, and parents with the organization. Furthermore, the website needs to generate annual reports, and it should be easy to maintain.
The site should instruct users to find information about all events, including fundraising, and contact the nonprofit for further inquiries by phone or e-mail, and promote donations to support counseling services. The second most crucial function of the site is to instruct users to fill out forms to provide useful information to support nonprofit operations. Creating content planning is essential to organize content in a manageable way.
To create a user-centric website, I built personas based on the information that was provided by the nonprofit. Personas help to understand users’ needs and relate to their personal experiences. Therefore, our goal was to sympathize with users first and get a feeling for why they are logging in. We wanted to know how the website can provide all the information users are searching for and what is the best way to deliver the information.
The purpose of the information architecture is to organize hierarchy. Based on the relationships, I put them in categories and articles. This process helps visualize the content to identify how the information relates to each other.
What CMS to use? After the research and comparison matrix, it was clear that Joomla is an effective CMS system for a small organization such as a nonprofit. It has an active community and a good number of themes; it is portable and easy to upgrade. Joomla administrators do not need to know too much about programming compared to users of Drupal, and Joomla is a bit more secure than WordPress. WordPress seems easier to use, but it could become challenging to manage due to all the plug-ins the websites are typically going to need. Consequently, Joomla is a good alternative.
In the user access matrix, we created a table to display different levels of access, depending on the role of the administrators. This technique is helpful to prevent mistakes and to prioritize tasks. All the primary functions of the foundation have been listed, and they have different access levels depending on their positions and experience. Below is a table for user access.
Once users are clearly defined, I created user stories to share simple descriptions of the person who is using the new capability, usually a user or customer of the system. I typically follow a simple template.
Now it was time for fun, after analyzing user stories, I had a clear vision on how the website is going to work. Wireframes are visual representations of page’s content, and frequently functionality, usually consist of boxes, or frames, to convey the interface’s layout in terms of space allocation and prioritization of images, text, and buttons before we jump into Joomla.
The Site Engagement Plan is vital to measure success base on budget, goals, and the foundation’s needs. The actions below explain how the website is going to help the foundation engage with users, and the tools needed to measure success.
Audience
Interviews: listen to users to identify their needs and make sure those needs are included in the website.
Survey: Know what users like or dislike about the website and discover whether or not they are finding what they are looking for.
Purpose
Help the community: increase the number of families being helped in the surrounding areas. Volunteers: increase the number of volunteers and mentors.
Appointments: promote programs and services.
Donations: Increase the number of sponsorships and supporters.Message
Post regularly: create a calendar to add small stories – tool: JEvents. Translations: translate content base on local demographics and celebrate main events to welcome people with different ethnicity.
Keep in mind holidays: celebrate most holidays and show stories or photos.
Share stories: create messages in social media with links to the website explaining how the organization benefit.
Clients Stay active: quarterly events activities. Subscriber list: create a subscriber list and send personalized. Newsletters - tool: acyMailing Starter is a tool that can schedule newsletters.
Content
Business alignment: make sure all the members of the organization believe in the primary mission of the organization.
Meaningful stories: encourage volunteers and clients to write short stories about their experiences.
Better SEO: improve the message of the website by using meaningful keywords and aligning them with the goals of the organization. Videos: create videos for special events.
Measurement
Monitor traffic: use Google Analytics to determine the most and least useful pages on the site.
Social media: help generate traffic with social media, and measure it. Heatmap: hotjar.com creates a heatmap of the site and identifies the most critical spots and reading patterns. Card sorting: optimal.com helps validate the architecture of the website by creating various tests.At the end, I created a strategic plan based on the brand manager’s vision to build a profitable return on investment. A comprehensive UX strategy is going to provide all the tools and measurements needed to measure success.
When we launched the website, We noticed an increase in traffic by 30%. Also, the site has a specific purpose and functionalities for members and users. The most important takeaway from this project was the implementation of a series of measurements to analyze success by using different metrics.