Original Giving landing page and payment form designs that me and my team were tasked with redesigning.

We had daily calls with our contacts at the university and weekly in-person meetings to review findings and designs. We began by meeting with our client at the university to understand all of the goals that they wanted to achieve throughout this project and to confirm the feasibility of what we could address within the project timeline. It was requested that we focus on “everyday normal people” as our target users. The targeted user was 18-50 years of age, had an average income, and worked a normal 9a-5p job or was a student.

We immediately started by walking around campus and questioned about 25 people total (students, professors and staff). We then questioned family and friends on whether they'd be willing to donate to the university. Immediate feelings of confusion and disbelief stood out.

How can we compel everyday people to give their hard-earned dollars to one of the wealthiest universities in the world?

Journey map of a user traversing through the 4 stages of giving.

After analyzing all of our research, we felt the best plan was to focus on including those elements that touched the emotions of being well informed about why this so seemingly wealthy university could still tremendously benefit from the help of our target user, as well as imagery on who they'd be helping. We also wanted to showcase the breadth and width of the site to provide a multitude of ways that potential donors could become involved with the university and all of its causes. We began with drawing up some rough drafts for what the landing page could look like. The giving landing page is the first place that most donors arrive, so this is where we wanted to draw out those feelings that we discovered from our surveys and interviews. To do this we focused on:

Looking back, I think that I could've made better use of low-fi wireframes to maximize feedback in the few client meetings that we had. With this being my first official client, I think I was a bit eager to create some cool mockups to show but moving forward I want to make sure that I always have mastered the element of "functionality" before investing time on polished visuals.

Being able to adjust your plans is important. I think we did a pretty decent job of using our time to come up with the best design for our client, but it was a challenge coordinating times to speak with some of the users provided by the client. With the 3-week timeframe on the project, we sort of had to work around the schedules of these users, forcing us to adjust our plans at times.

If given the chance, I'd track the performance of the payment form to confirm if our solution remedied the abandonment rate issue. Regarding the landing page, I'd be really interested in tracking the conversion rates and mapping the many different navigation routes that users take to arrive at the payment form, to uncover more insights into what could further interest potential visitors of the page.