Design thinking advocacy

Part of the mission of the Changemakers series is to promote and advocate for design thinking as a holistic design and business practice. With our non-profit stakeholders, our team participated in a 3-day design thinking workshop facilitated and hosted by Artefact, collaborating closely on an external challenge as a means of demonstrating iterative design processes to our non-profit. After this initial kick off, I worked closely with the team’s PM and UX researcher to pull together design thinking exercises from industry leaders like frog to start laying down a discovery roadmap to uncover and better understand our org’s biggest challenges.

Discovery phase

This challenge statement sounded like a website redesign, which is a solution to a problem we couldn’t yet see. To work on uncovering the why? behind the ask, myself, the PM, and a UX researcher developed a workshop using a few ice breakers and an exercise called The Ripple Effect. Typically, this exercise is used to uncover and map out all user groups, from internal users like staff, to primary, secondary, and even tertiary users. For this particular workshop, we flipped the script and worked out from a question. Who would be effected if the WEC didn’t have a new website/activity hub?

Through this exercise we were able to get a clearer vision of who they served and what problems they were up against. Running an old, outdated website had a wide impact on everyone from their own staff members who struggled to maintain content, to volunteers and donors, and even broader to Washington state legislators and the failure of big environmental initiatives.

As soon as we identified key users, we dove into contacting and interviewing individuals from these groups. Their insight validated what we suspected; that the WEC struggled to get their story out clearly and keep clear paths to engage. From this research, we proposed a new challenge statement:

How might we help WEC tell their story so their programs can excite new audiences to take action?

Revisiting the challenge

From these exercises and research synthesis, with the new challenge statement as our north star, we proposed several new deliverable options:

• Homepage redesign
  With over 1,400 unique pages within wecprotects.org, a redesign of the full site would require a deeper dive than we have the time to provide. Within our limitations, we could provide a data-backed redesign of a single, highly trafficked page of the site: the homepage.

• Materials for in-person interactions
  Coalition partners would be happy to “talk up” WEC, but simply lack the language and guidance on how to do so. This option would prepare materials for these partners to aid them in discussing WEC. And by discussing WEC, its mission, and success, the partners would in-effect be supporting their own mission.

• Coalition communications materials
  This option seeks to cultivate a more compelling in-person interaction than simply requesting a visitor to “sign up for the newsletter.” Brochures, booth backers, a looping slide deck, take-away “action” items (e.g, survey, 10 ways to Make a Difference bookmark, etc.) are potential end results.

• Public outreach social marketing kit
  This option would focus on online interactions via social media. It would include research, messaging, initial campaign schedule, and production graphics for distribution on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We’re talking animated gifs, beautiful, on-brand banners with witty copy for Facebook-sponsored posts, and IG posts.

Of these options, the Washington Environmental Council chose to stick with a website redesign. They felt that that was where they needed the most help, while everything else they could do internally. We framed this homepage work as a starting point for a broader effort to redesign the entire website.

Outcome

Using the data we collected from interviews, surveys, and competitive research, I worked on refining a responsive wireframe to test with users. We were able to test this wireframe with existing volunteers and prospective donors and volunteers and collect more feedback and refine accordingly.

Based on that user feedback, I added several opportunities to entice and educate prospective environmental activists by presenting a variety of ways to engage.

Newsletter Sign Up
Their newsletter sign up has been a proven success when it comes to reaching their base; this has been something that users looked for and wanted to engage with.

Take Action
This tested especially well with users who didn’t have a lot of time or didn’t know where to start. By indicating different levels of involvement at a glance, prospective activists were able to get a sense of the variety of ways they could engage with WEC.

Modular Components
Overall, we wanted to keep this page highly modular to make it easier for them to remove content as needed and A/B test to further refine once the website is launched.

Research Synthesis
As part of our deliverables, we also summarized all of our research and guidelines into a 33 page document that included:

• Interviews

• Workshops

• Surveys

• Personas

• Secondary research (competitive analysis)

• SEO guidelines

• Analytics guidelines

• Design thinking resources

In addition to conducting research, I organized, designed, and input the research and guidelines into a clean, interactive document.

Takeaways

When we asked WEC what they took away from this project, their communications director told us:

"I think the biggest thing is that we've never had the capacity, knowledge, or skills to actually dedicate time to doing all of this background research, user testing, and data analysis to INFORM a website design. We've just focused on what WE need to communicate OUT to people, not what our audience wants to get from us, which is a big shift in thinking."

This big shift in thinking, combined with our wireframes & content guidelines, user research synthesis and resources, and analytics guidelines will set the groundwork for a complete website redesign in the upcoming months.