Once I got the ball rolling, users of the site felt that while the experience was good, it was begging for some visual inspiration from our actual homes around the world, along with pictures of our rescues.

And it turns out that most of our donors were still donating through checks, avoiding the main website donation button altogether. This was a huuuuuge red flag. The process should be easy for them, not something to avoid altogether.

After the research phase, it was clear there was no main direction for our website users. A new focus on the main page hero as well as the donate page needed to be emphasized. We saw simple strategies pay off huge dividends for our competitors and we wanted to do the same.

Because we had amazing examples from our competitors, I could model our flow to mimic theirs. I began to imagine our user’s online journey with an emphasis on imagery and pulling on heart strings. This included a seamless donation experience front and center, and giving an overview of our organization in a clean and direct format.

The old site had a very simplistic information architecture and it fell short of capturing the attention of our users. Even though the content was good, re-arranging it in a meaningful manner was paramount.

Still, a lesson to be learned here was to not overcomplicate things and to simply let the imagery and content speak for itself.

I began drawing sketches of main pages to illustrate the number of possibilities we could go in, and eventually landed on lo-fi wireframes after approval.

With our competitors in mind, I knew there were a few different places we could place our main CTA button, along with where some impactful images needed to be seen.

After getting the main stakeholders opinions involved, it got easier to progress into something more tangible for them to see, with placeholders and our marketing headlines taking shape.

In order to determine if the design made sense, I took these wireframes and conducted usability testing with our users. The usability test was broken out into several tasks: setting up reoccuring donations, donating once, finding merch and purchasing, signing up for the newsletter, and finding events and RSVP-ing.

Users rated their experience with a simple system usability survey, they were timed for each task, and they gave me qualitative feedback on how it could be improved. The feedback we received contributed to changes we made for the final design.

How would a simple hybrid mix of good user experience and emotional imagery perform?

With our new comps, we made sure to make the call to actions as bold as possible, and laid them on top of some imagery straight from the recovery homes. Each section was assigned an image with an emphasis on an individual rescued child, along with simple facts and clean copy.

We decided to include whole sections on the rescue homes around the world where they could click and see which rescues were where, and where each donated dollar was going to. We also integrated Stripe on our platform which allowed donations to come in seamlessly.We also revamped the Donation page itself. We decided to put all of our marketing efforts into headlines and statistics, alongside even more impactful imagery to help our donors feel motivated to change the world.

We got to refresh each page accordingly as well, using imagery to reinforce the current nature of the organization: live events, celebrities that came out to support us, and even an educational piece we branded as HeroesTv.

With the whole website now redesigned with fresh copy and marketing, we were confident we would see results.