Give to the Max Day is an important day to the University. It is one of their largest single fundraising days of the year. In order for this project to be considered a success, we wanted to increase usability, accessibility, branding and to give donors more access to interest they want to support.
I was the main contributor to this project. Some of the responsibilities I had were to research, iterate, test, design, and implement that design.
As a donor to the University of Minnesota, I want to engage with their Give to the Max Day celebration. When I go online to give a donation, I am looking for an easy experience that leads me to giving my donations to the causes that are most important to me.
Give to the Max Day takes place at the same time in November every year. In order to prepare for this date we began working on this project in July starting with research and testing. The final design was completed in August and live on the site the first week of November. Overall this project took around three months. In order to consider this project a success we wanted to hear positive feedback from our users, increase the number of users who engaged with the site, and increase the clarity of certain aspects of the site.
To conduct research for this project I did a competitive analysis of other universities around the country that also have "giving days''. During my research I found that there were several tactics colleges were using in order to be more effective at getting donations. Some sites incorporated gamification by creating leaderboards and point systems as well as incorporating statistics into the site. To conduct thorough research I visited over one hundred websites and took notes and screenshots of all the types of tactics that they used to make their websites. I compiled a report for my team and made suggestions based on the findings of what we could do to incorporate the ideas into our site.
We conducted several user tests on the old design of the site. Our goal was to uncover pain points that our users were experiencing with the site. The University of Minnesota has an internal testing team for web projects. Using these facilities we conducted over 15 user tests. Our testers were recruited online from a pool of people who represented all our user demographics. To test the site I wrote the scenarios we would have users complete in order to find those pain points. It was important to see how users found funds on the site. Our main objective on Give to the Max Day is to raise funds for groups around the University network that receive match donations; donations that have a sponsor willing to match every dollar with a dollar. I wrote five scenarios for our tests. First we wanted to have someone go through the entire donation process. This included finding a fund they wanted to give money to and completing the donation form. In this scenario we observed that people were having trouble finding the funds that they wanted. The fund list was in the order of when we entered their information into the site and users had trouble predicting where the target fund was. During this process we uncovered several issues we wanted to address in our redesign. Users had a hard time finding the desired fund they wanted to donate to The section about prizes was not clear to people specifically how to win prizes The events section was also hard to read and many testers said they skipped over reading it Once we understood the issues our users were facing I was tasked with developing a strategy to address these issues.
The initial designs for this project were based on a combination of some of the most effective ideas from our testing. It was revealed in testing that there were issues understanding our prizes section and events section. We also noticed that the way our matches were laid out that it was messy for some users to find what they needed. I presented these photos to our team to gauge how people felt about the solutions I had come up with. Most of my recommendations were based on the Nielsen Norman Usability Heuristics. By using these common web tactics I was able to come up with some initial elements that would drive traffic to the site and increase engagement.
At this time I was interested in implementing techniques that would increase engagement. My initial thoughts were to create more streamlined sections of the site. I wanted to clean up the way that information was displayed. I created a new tile format for our matches page. The matches are important to our users since that is the main way they find the funds they want to donate to. This need was in the forefront of my design. I cleaned up the text of the original design, minimized the amount of information that was found on the tile, and increased the ways the system provided feedback to our users.
After review with my team and some additional research around what other universities use for their giving days I proposed the final design of this project. The main objectives were accomplished during this project. The testing we conducted helped to reveal issues with the original design. The results of the testing as well as the competitive analysis research that I conducted for this project helped to determine its design. One of my main goals with this redesign was improving clarity with our messaging. During testing our users indicated that there was an issue with the way the information was presented. In my design I focused on making our information more clear. I sectioned off parts of the site and created more visually distinct sections of the site.
This project was a huge success. The website redesign was well received by our users and my team. During this project I had the opportunity to learn many lessons. There was a steep increase in user donations after the website redesign. Last year the site had 6,841 donations after the site redesign 7,607 donations. My reading directly contributed to the amount of donations going up and resulted in a successful Give to the Max Day.
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