YesLiberia: Website Redesign
Overview
YesLiberia is a non-profit organization committed to advancing education and providing support to children in Liberia through fundraising initiatives. The organization recently underwent a website redesign project with the objective of boosting donation contributions, particularly from monthly donors. The redesign incorporated recommendations from the organization's board of directors and incorporated insights gleaned from usability testing. The current website can be accessed at https://yesliberia.org/.
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In keeping with industry standards and to address any evolving needs, YesLiberia regularly updates its website every three years to ensure it remains competitive and relevant.
Role
UX Researcher
UX Designer
Tools
Project Scale
1 year
Approach
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Conduct user research
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Learn about target users and their pain points
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Create UI mockups for the solution
Understand
Analyze
Prototype
Test
Research
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Understand the problems
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Know organization objectives
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Create Personas
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Affinity Mapping
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Prioritizing
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Conduct user test, iterate and refine
User Research
In order to evaluate the changes that need to be made and improve the website we needed to understand from a new visitors point of view what the experience is currently like. For which conducting usability tests with new users was a useful research method. I created a test script for the interviews and use cases for 3 different types of users visiting the website: donors, fundraisers and volunteers. We recruited 6 participants using this consent form requesting their imformation and conducted the tests. The responses gathered from the testing were then used to analyze, grouped into ploblem areas, and prioritized by importance.
​​To prioritize the defined user pain points, we used color dot voting. By placing colored dots, participants in UX workshops, activities, or collaborative sessions individually vote on the importance of design ideas, features, usability findings, and anything else that requires prioritization.
User Personas
Based on the affinity maps and conversations with stakeholders I came up with personas for target users including their behaviours, pain points, goals and motivations to create a better understanding of our users.
Information Architecture
After multiple interations using the original IA of the website and presenting our proposed changes in the IA with our stakeholder, we finalized on this updated version of the website structure to use for our website redesign.
Previous structure
Updated structure
Redesigning and Iteration
In collaboration with 3 other designers in the UX team, I began designing the pages based on usability heuristics along with priorities identified through research and defined by our stakeholders.
Throughout the process of designing we recieved feedback and comments on Figma from the stakeholders. Ensuring the design was aligned with the brand identity, we created these final high fidelity wireframes.
Homepage
Our Team Page
Donate Page
These are some of the pages I designed incorporating accessibility guidelines in terms of color contrasts, text sizes and the clickable items. Although not all of these elements have been adapted in the redesign changes since they are solid in the brand's identity hence there is an histance in changing those, it was an important aspect of my process as a UX designer on the team.
Website Changes
To give some insight into how our redesign has changed the current website, here are some before and after pages in comparison. Since the process oof development and testing is still in progress these are not finalized and subjected to further be modified in the near future.
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Menu Before
Home Before
Donate Before
Menu After
Home After
Donate After
Next Steps
For our usability testing the webdesign team is currently redesigned website used for testing using sanbox, viewable here: https://sandbox.yesliberia.org/UAT/. We are using an excel document to keep track of testing functionalities of the design to support during this development phase and identifing technical issues with every element of the site.
Key Insights
Here are some leasons I learned through working on this project:​
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It is imperative to substantiate your design decisions with thorough research. Despite possessing a solid comprehension of the modifications suggested by the stakeholders, it was vital to examine the existing website with new users in order to validate pain points, prioritize changes, and detect any overlooked issues.
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Persuading stakeholders to devote time to research can be a challenging endeavor, but incorporating them throughout every stage of the design thinking process can facilitate comprehension of its necessity.
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Recognize that your proposed user-centric solution may not always satisfy stakeholders, and that iterating to arrive at a mutually acceptable compromise that accommodates both parties is sometimes unavoidable.