National Breast Cancer Foundation

Situation:
At a Crossroads
National Breast Cancer Foundation was at a crossroads. The mission of the organization had slowly transitioned over the past several years, but none of their digital assets came for the ride. Their website did not reflect what the organization stood for. Even though this organization had been a client of my team for years, they would never provide the budget or resources for us to handle their website. Fast forward to 2016. The decision to ignore the UX of their website had turned on them. They gave us the go ahead to finally do some much needed strategy to figure out what course of action they should take.

Approach:
As the UX designer for this project, I was excited because I had worked with this organization for some time and had finally gotten the opportunity to help them connect their mission with their digital presence.

Revisiting User Research‍
There was much work ahead of us. I decided to start from scratch and revisit the basics. Even though we were familiar with the organization mission and users, the organization was doubting its own identity and was looking to us for some clarity. So, even though I was pretty confident after several years of having the same frustrating pain points with their website and learning about non profit best practices, I went on a mission to clarify their users. Who are your users? What do they want? How can we satisfy that want within the restrictions placed on us? And as always, I ask, ‘why?’ before I finalize any decision because it’s always a good reality check.

Untangling the User Journey
Once our research was complete, we had a very specific idea of where the holes were and how we could address them. Without doing an entire overhaul of their current IA, we worked within the means of reality for our client. We knew this whole process was going to be a much larger project.I worked with my team to sort through the digital journeys of all of their users. We considered almost every entrance point they could make onto the website – social ads, display, donation, direct, organic search, paid search… etc.

Wireframes & User journey
Once our research was complete, we knew where the holes were and how we could address them. Without doing an entire overhaul of their IA, we worked within the means of reality for our client.

Strategy:

Ignoring Your Base
‍The organization has several main users, but they were ignoring the most important one – the people they claimed to help, women who have breast cancer. We determined the website needed to make it easier for these woman to identify if they were in the right place, where they needed to go and what kind of information was available.

We focused on authenticity by gathering real stories along with naturalistic in-environment photography of survivors, loved ones, and workers at the organization.

Transparency and quantification of the impact of the organization was key to the strategy because this was a time where there was little trust for large charities.

Ultimately, people need to believe in the organization mission and their impact had to be told clearly and powerfully.

Execution:
Workshop and Prototyping
We had a session presenting and working through the journeys with the client. We showed them exactly what their users go through, allowing them to realize their core issue - their current digital presence was not in line with their mission any longer, affecting their donation strategy and core service offerings. We then delivered a digital and web strategy with interactive prototypes that followed non-profit and usability best practices as well as strategies on retaining and acquiring donors. The client was able to take that information and secure the next step. A website build, paid media plan and social strategy.

Updated UI & Prototypes
I designed high fidelity prototypes including updated UI styles that aligned with the strategy.

Ui styles