ColoradoGives.org
Via Boulder/CO Research Meetup Group:
Annual Giving Back Project
Project Overview
About ColoradoGives.org:
Colorado Gives 365 is a program of Community First Foundation (a registered 501(c)(3)). The program provides a one-stop-shop platform for charitable giving. The project centers around its website and project goals include: evaluating site navigation and flow, search functionality, as well as understanding what compels users to donate and how the website is currently meeting/not meeting those needs.
Meetup.com event/group listing screenshot
About Boulder/CO UX Research Meetup Group:
The Boulder/CO UX Research Meetup is a professional networking group managed by Alaina Beaver, who had the idea to organize an Annual Giving Back Project within its regular programming, which leverages the collective talents of the group members by providing valuable pro-bono digital expertise to organizations in the Colorado community that likewise “give back” to people through their services. The Annual Giving Back Project 2023 was managed by Laura Lighty and Tracy Jerard.
Project Duration:
4 months
My Role
As a UX Researcher on a team of 5 my individual contributions were:
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Participated in the project kick-offs with teams at large and my project team
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Met with stakeholder to understand scope and create priorities
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Contributed to weekly team planning and progress sessions
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Conducted an independent heuristic evaluation
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Created the comprehensive summary report of the team heuristic evaluation
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Contributed to the writing of the interview script and usability script
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Conducted 2 user interview and usability sessions
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Summarized my findings and insights from the usability study
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Met with the team to prioritize key insights
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Took on the active role creating final stakeholder presentation deck
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Presented key findings and recommendations to the stakeholder in a live presentation
Action
Initially, we met with the stakeholder to discuss goals, priorities, the timeline and resources available to us to make the most of this opportunity.
There were 3 potential areas for us to choose from:
Navigation
Evaluating how donors navigate the site and follow the calls to action
Search Functionality
There are two different search bars with varied functionality, should they be combined?
Donor Insights
What information compels donors to donate to a non-profit and are we meeting/not meeting those needs?
2
3
2
1
Given that this is a volunteer project and our team had a limited amount of time to dedicate, we encouraged the stakeholder to prioritize the categories and pick one that holds the highest priority. The stakeholder chose #3, since gaining a deeper understanding in this area is a fundamental principle to the organization.
Having prioritized the focus area, the team also wanted to keep a secondary area of focus, and chose #2 to evaluate and gather insights about.
Next, the team chose the methodology, landing on two* industry-standard UX methods to gather feedback:
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Heuristic evaluation
A heuristic evaluation is a usability study where evaluators examine an interface and measure it against usability principles. The five researchers working on this project all served as evaluators for the Colorado Gives website. Each evaluator progressed through the website and noted areas that did not comply with the usability principles. The evaluations were then compiled and analyzed.
Heuristic Analysis Report, screenshot of 1st pg
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Task-based usability testing
The team of researchers worked together to compile a list of questions to ask seven volunteer participants. Some had no prior knowledge of Colorado Gives while others were familiar with the site or had donated through the site. Each researcher conducted one to two interviews. Each interview was approximately thirty minutes. The questions were centered around the search functionality, the non profit profile pages and the donation process. Participants were observed in their user behaviors and were encouraged to engage in think-aloud narration to explain to the researchers why they were doing what they were doing, what their thoughts were, etc. Researchers took notes during each interview and recorded the interviews as well. The notes from the interviews were then compared and refined to eliminate redundancies for the purposes of the presentation.
Usability Study Script, sceenshot of 1st pg
* The team also initially worked on conducting user interviews, but due to recruiting challenges, and time constraints, after conducting 1 user interview, we had to shift focus on the other methods above. The task-based usability test did include some of the qualitative questions we had planned to ask during initial user interviews.
Results
Based on the heuristic evaluation and usability testing conducted, we created a full report of all findings and made key recommendations. Some of the examples of these included:
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combining two different search bars into one to allow users to seamlessly find information on non-profits of interest;
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bringing vital non-profit information like financials, programming, etc. above the fold of the individual non-profit page to allow users to easily scan and find key data;
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systemizing the design cards of various non-profits and fundraisers and fundraisers as they appear in the search results to improve scannability and reduce cognitive overload.
Next Steps
The stakeholder was very appreciative of our efforts, took our recommendations into account and plans on working with their internal teams to implement some of our key findings. As an iterative process, there's a plan to perform additional testing by the internal team once these changes have been implemented.
