PAWsome
Responsive Website:
Research & Design of the Donation Flow
Project Overview
PAWsome is a non-profit organization that serves at risk pets and provides services for pet owners to care for their pets. It heavily relies on donations in order to provide its services. Pawsome needs to investigate what inspires its donors to contribute and design a donation flow based on the findings.
About Pawsome:
Project Duration:
2 months
The Problem
The website needs to make it easy for donors to make a contribution. Donors need to feel inspired and invested to donate to the organization.
The Goal
Conduct research and based on the findings create a seamless and simple flow that allows donors to learn about the organization, connect to its mission, be inspired to donate and experience an intuitive donation flow.
My Role
Research, ideation, design, testing, prototyping, iteration
The Action
What compels you to donate?
I conducted a research study via unmoderated survey with 6 participants, making sure to recruit a diverse group of participants who consistently contribute to various causes and asked them questions about their past donation experiences, like what compels them to donate, what kind of information would inspire them to make a contribution, as well as examples of past positive and negative donation experiences.
Knowing that the money I give is properly managed and the organization is without greed.
Next I synthesized my findings into two categories:
1) information that helps donors make a decision to contribute
2) information that helps donors experience a seamless donation flow
Bearing this information in mind, I began the Ideation Phase, brainstorming initial design ideas and layouts.
My goal was to create minimalistic designs, which would make it easy for donors to find key information needed to understand the cause, visually appealing to aide the organization in garnering donations, and simple to use, to make sure it was accessible to all.
Once I've settled on a design which hit these areas, I started wireframing.
User Testing
Once I've created a low fidelity prototype, I began user testing. My goal was to understand how the users would navigate my design, whether the key information donors needed was needed was easy to find and comprehend, and whether the design felt familiar and simple to use.
To achieve this, I conducted 15-30 minute usability tests with 5 users.
The Results:
5/5 users found the design simple and easy to use
5/5 users completed the main user flow of making a donation
1/5 users wanted to be able to see the PayPal screen, so I later modified my design to include this
4/5 users were happy to see the breakdown of how the charity spends the donation
Based on this feedback, I made a few minor modifications in my Adobe XD and created the final polished hi-fidelity prototype:
Lessons Learned
Some of the biggest takeaways from this project for me was realizing how important it is for donors to know that their contribution matters and that it's important to build trust during the donation process by sharing how their money will be spent. I also learned how important it is to eliminating any cognitive load, so donors do not get frustrated and leave without contributing to a cause they care about merely because of poor system design.
Next Steps:
Since this project only focused on building out the main user flow, the donation flow, the next steps would include iterating on the design process by conducting research and designing more areas of the site, like: resources, about, services, contact, etc.
