The Opportunity

The Shanti Uganda Society Our clickable prototype can be visited here, enjoy! Case Study brief overview: Shanti Uganda are a Maternal Health NGO in Uganda with their Headquarters in Vancouver, BC. Our project was to redesign their website into a user friendly and imagery prominent design Our goals were to help drive donations and push users to sign up to their newsletters and blogs. We gathered our key findings from our user research, built user flows, site maps, customer journey maps, storyboards, feature prioritization graphs and paper wireframes before making anything digital. After finalizing the high fidelity designs and handing off to the web developers, as a team we were happy with our final product, as were our client. Enjoy the experience of our full prototype for yourself HERE To see in full detail, continue below for the entire case study. Thank You! Shanti Uganda are an NGO who are tackling the problem of the preventable maternal and infant mortality rates in Uganda using the midwifery model of care, which means monitoring the physical, psychological and social well-being of the mother throughout the childbearing cycle. The role of a midwife goes beyond just the birth- they are there for the mother and family throughout the pregnancy, as a coach and partner, and if deployed in large numbers, can prevent 2/3rds of maternal deaths worldwide. The owners of Shanti Uganda felt their existing website design was outdated and stopped directing their customers and potential volunteers to their site and instead to their social media. As a result the website had been neglected of current information and Natalie Angell-Besseling, the owner felt it was time for a redesign which ultimately led them to RED. Shanti wanted to showcase their achievements and unique model of care through their website which they would utilize as a primary source to display the action they are taking and most importantly, why they do it. They held a strong affection towards Chip Wilsons Imagine1day.com Etheopian NGO website and expressed their liking to the layout and selective wording. As a team we took note of their inspiration and referred back to it during our design process. The Research We started exploring the research by looking at the current conditions and standard methodologies of the industry and their online presence. This helped us to find the right questions to ask that were relevant to somebody who was interested in volunteering or possibly a Midwife or Doula in training. We conducted user interviews with a variety of people including Shanti’s current and previous donors, volunteers and demographics of interest. We also conducted a survey that we each sent out to our social media networks that amounted to 50 unique responses. “Market research has shown that individuals and corporations would donate more to non-profits if they had more information on how donations were used.”-redbirdonline.com Key Insights from our Research: With an estimated 10 million NGOs worldwide there is a lot competition out there so we quickly understood their website had to encompass a unique and user centric design to really set them apart from the many others. “The scope of insensitivity” A theory based on Mother Teresa’s wisdom simply means when we are asked to give money to help a large number of needy people, say a 100 young pregnant Ugandan women — we ignore the number 100. Because we can not comprehend that number, instead we substitute easy-to-read cues, like our feelings for a single needy person. As a result we suggested they create a ‘Real Stories’ page, where users and demographics of interest could read upon the individual experiences and emotions of women who have and are about to give birth in the conditions Shanti are working to improve. 84% of Canadians donate to NGOs with an average individual donation of $446 per year and the collective annual donations equate to $10.6 billion by Canadians alone. We asked our interviewees and previous donors why they chose to invest in their chosen charities and some of our replies were “I felt a sense of urgency” “I felt something from the website before signing up” “Their core values are similar to mine, so I donated” “I was moved by their story” … The competition To help us identify a gap where Shantis online presence could fit in the current market, we assessed the functionalities of Imagine One Day USA, Midwives for Haiti, Acumen, and Ripple Africa. Their features, avenues for exploration and online donation possibilities were our key targets. We found they had many features in common: Online Donations: All of them have this feature yet Midwives for Haiti allows donation only via Paypal and Acumen allows donations between $25-$5,000 via a credit card. Shanti Uganda have both of these options via their website and possess a good starting point against their competitors. Updated Blogs: 3 out of the 4 websites we looked at had up to date blogs, they are all within the last 3 months of their latest update. This is something we spoke about as their last blog post was in 2012. We were able to show them how important and attracting having an up to date blog can be. Newsletters Acumen are the only ones from whom we researched into that do not have a newsletter, however the other three do. We looked into this feature as Shanti had expressed their personal desire for the advance on a newsletter. Staff Profiles: All sites have their own staff introductions and profiles provided however not all have an extensive amount of information or any personal reflection from each person. This would again, increase the empathy factor and help create a bond between the users and Shanti. Social Media: All of the websites have FaceBook and Twitter accounts and have functionality to share their information through social media networks which from our research shows as the primary way Shanti get their news out. The User To understand what our customers are feeling throughout the donation process, we explored the customer journey as shown above. It follows the users through the traditional donation process in the current industry online abilities. Overall, the experience is a positive one, but there are major pain points when it comes to contacting the charities and filling out forms for the application. We compiled all our research, user interviews, and surveys and created our primary persona that best represents all our users. The Features Early on in our design process, we identified the opportunities and gaps we could fill in Shanti’s redesign. We knew we had to keep Imagine1day in our minds, however we were seeing a pattern in our research that showed their typical design may not be the best approach for Shanti as pushing the femininity and personal stories was key to keep our users attention. We developed a feature prioritization list as we had so many ideas that we needed to stay organized. From this we were able to see which of the features we saw that were not completely crucial to creating our minimum viable product. So when we had come to an agreement upon a set of features, we created an ideal flow of how our users would interact and donate through the website. Wireframing We started sketching out our rough ideas based on the knowledge that our users primarily respond to imagery and transparency. As the research shows there are over 10 million NGOs so our designs needed to stand out against the rest and provide the users with instant information on what it is they do. We felt keeping a feminine design across the site was the creative and eye catching approach we needed so we created our flow out of these sketches and took them to a few potential users for paper prototype testing. From testing we found some confusion with the page title names and composition of our designs which we took into account and corrected for further testing. Moving onto our mid fidelity designs in Sketch, we spoke with Shanti Uganda and agreed to send a mock of what we have created up to this date for some consolidation across their team. However we were asked to submit in High Fidelity and at the time we didn’t feel too time pressured so we submitted high fidelity of our home page on both desktop and mobile. In hindsight we would not have agreed to high fidelity and compromised on mid so we would leave ourselves time for a revisit. Our client gave us positive feedback on our designs and research, however asked us to refer back to the layout of Imagine1day as they wanted to present themselves in the same manner. We discussed our thoughts as a UX Team and redesigned our sketches to meet the needs of Shantis expectations, however expressing we did not believe it to be the right design avenue for them but we agreed to continue on as our time pressures had increased. The Prototype Our final design was an interactive experience that allowed our users to read who Shanti are and donate to their cause. The website will provide the courses and donation packages available attached to an external Shopify payment account . Once the content has been created, It will also provide up to date blog posts and the ability to share articles and pages on social media. There is no real sign up process other than the choice to enter in their email address for newsletter updates. Below is an example of our prototype, enjoy the experience of our full prototype for yourself HERE