DisabilitySA is a non-profit website that connects individuals with disabilities by building relations, exchanging information, and creating opportunities for them in the San Antonio community.
The primary use of their website is to increase donations and have potential volunteers reach out. This 3-week project was created to help redesign the current website to increase outreach with potential donors and volunteers.
Our research began by analyzing the possible problems of the DisabilitySA website, existing non-profit competitor’s websites, and interviewing users to view the usability of the website. Below was our result for each phase of our research process.
Background for reader: This research was developed prior to getting in contact with DisabilitySA. Due to multiple failed attempts at reaching them, our team felt that this website was a good opportunity to test our UX skills and also help the community of disabled individuals. After the project was completed, I tried to contact DisabilitySA again with our finalized prototype and was able to show our finalized prototype design to them and they showed interest in using it for their current website.
We looked at other non-profit organizations that worked in the community of disabled individuals. Below are the weak spots we found in their website that were potential ideas to use to differentiate our design of DisabilitySA’s website.
Background for reader: We were able to get in touch with The Arc of San Antonio and gained valuable insight on non-profit organizations that focused on the community of disabled individuals. We learned their primary business needs that helped us define our problem statement.
DisabilitySA’s website was created to be a tool for those with all forms of disabilities who struggle to connect with the community. We noticed their website was not improving this engagement with users to volunteer, donate, and create relationships within the community. Our problem statement was then clear:
How might we improve the user experience of the website so that it encourages users to volunteer and donate to DisabilitySA to create relationships with the community of disabled individuals?
This Affinity Diagram was created after interviewing users who analyzed DisabilitySA’s current website and gave us insights on pain points and suggestions that could lead us to potential solutions for our design.
After gaining insight on how the current website interacted with users. We developed user personas to help ideate who the typical user for DisabilitySA’s website would be. Our team generated the persona of William, a person with disabilities that would be able to help us empathize with the users and understand their needs and pain points.
This journey map was created to empathize William’s journey to navigate how it could benefit him using the DisabilitySA website to meet his needs and pain points.
We first began by ideating a site map to provide us with a guide on how we needed to structure the navigation of the website to de-clutter and asses what was necessary for the users navigation.
We followed our site map with sketches of what this navigation of the website could look like.
Eventually after many sketches and designs we came up with our mid-fi wireframe that became our first prototype we used to test with users to see the effectiveness this could have on the usability of the website.
We also made sure to include a responsive design for our mobile users and kept a consistent design with our desktop view.
During this phase we previewed our designs with other peers and began our user testing to view the usability of the prototype.
Feedback from users:
These are the iterations we implemented:
Next Steps for DisabilitySA prototype: In the future, we plan to add a live chat feature for users to communicate to DisabilitySA’s team to ask any questions about the organization. We also wanted to find new ways to encourage users to sign up and be an active member of the DisabilitySA organization by volunteering their time or donating money to campaigns.
Lessons Learned: It was important to remember the navigation of the website for users and how it plays an important role in the user’s journey. We became aware of accessibility issues that were pain points for users when they were interacting with the website. And lastly, we learned it is important to be empathetic through out the entire UX design process to create the best design for users.
