We were given this general “How might we…” question: “How might we help social impact organizations express their value, and inspire people to take action in order to drive positive change?” In a group of 3 we were able to divide and conquer a design sprint within a week, developing a solution to inspire millennials to donate to the Downtown Eastside Women’s Center.
To be able to complete the sprint in time, I completed the following tasks during the stages of our design sprint:
Tasks completed:
First of all, why did we choose to focus on increasing donations through millennials?
BUT most donations are made by older donors (aged 65+) because millennials don’t have as much to give
Women face unique barriers:
Provide a safe, non-judgmental environment for women who live and/or work in the downtown east-side
Single form so donors don’t have to put too much effort in submitting their donation
Clear headings that separate different areas on the form
Thank you message clear on the form
Option for a tax receipt
Option to set donation amount, one-time vs monthly and donate to specific areas at the top
To increase donations provided by millennials towards the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre
I created a clear interview script consisting of mainly open ended questions. From there, we each interviewed 3 millennials who may or may not have made donations to a charity in the past. 3 themes arose from the interviews:
“Donors appreciate knowing their donation is going towards a specific person or group of people as it gives them a specific picture of who they are helping”
“Donors want to know that no matter the amount, their donation is making a difference towards a specific cause.”
“Donors do not have time to research specific charities and rely on social media or friends to bring awareness to reliable charities to donate to.”
A majority of our interviewees mentioned pain points, motivations, and behaviors surrounding “transparency” and “donation impact”. As a result, we decided to base our solution primarily on “donation impact” while incorporating transparency into it.
Here, a new HMW question was born:
How might we inspire millennials to donate to the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre through demonstrating the impact they can have on the work the charity does?
While my groupmates developed the target selection mapping, I refined the persona we decided on.
We returned to our competitor analysis to decide on features we wanted for the website.
Home page:
Donation page:
In addition to the features we found from our competitive analysis, we also wanted to include these features to give millennials like Britney the transparency they look for as well as show the donation impact any amount they donate will achieve.
Take a break to learn more about what the DEWC does...
"Herstory in Focus 2022 is the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre’s 6th annual gala, aiming to raise support and awareness for the work of DEWC and celebrating the strength and resilience of the women we serve." - DEWC Newsletter, 2021. Shown in the above photos is Elder Lousia (left) and Larissa (right) share a hug after performing at Herstory in Focus 2020. Go to their website or read this newletter to learn more about how you can make a difference.
While my group mate developed the solution sketch from our variety of sketches, I developed the storyboard with another group mate. This would be the journey our persona Britney would go through:
Based on that we started building our prototype. We wanted to play with new and existing colors of DEWC’s brand while adding a bit of yellow to symbolize hope and cheerfulness. We wanted women who visited the website to feel welcomed and get a sense that they would be safe.
So, we decided on the typeface “Prata & Lato” and developed the following colour palette.
After completing user testing, we found these change that could be made, in order of prioritization and mapped it to determine which changes were priority.
After I completed the majority of the presentation slide deck, I helped to implement these changes.
And in the end, this was our final product, along with our compelling presentation.
Don’t have too many options - users got overwhelmed when there were too many CTAs on the home page, even though they all accomplished the same task
It was helpful to know that we only needed 2 of the same CTAs on the home page to accomplish the same task of getting users to donate.
Continue to remember the problem space, theme, and goal to keep us on track and ensure we were developing a solution that was clear.
Add more icons to allow users to easily scan the text/website
Have options for different types of posts for users to share on social media
Further user testing with updated prototype
A UX Designer with a background in Speech-Language Pathology working with brain injury survivors. Over 6 years of experience in leveraging empathy to understand others’ perspectives and create constructive rehabilitation plans and experiences with a goal to be a UX Designer who advocates for accessibility and inclusivity.
