for patrons of The Girl Scouts of Greater New York
Streamlining the donation flow
CLIENT : Girl Scouts Of Greater New York Organisation
RESEARCH METHODS : Interviews, surveys, questionnaires, card-sorting, Tree-testing, User testing
DURATION : 14 weeks
Overview
The Girls Scouts of Greater New York website is a one stop solution for all the information on the organisation and the non-profit work they propagate amongst the young minds. 


This project leverages insights from interview and questionnaires to analyse data to redesign a smoother experience of the process of Donation to the organisation and its affiliates.The Girls Scouts of Greater New York website is a one stop solution for all the information on the organisation and the non-profit work they propagate amongst the young minds.
My Role
Mediating and synthesising ideas to work on together towards a final product assimilating the teams' solutions. Creating the low-medium fidelity prototype.
Problems
The website presents as an abundant source of information needing order and organisation.
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While extensively text heavy, the design seems to target a younger audience and therefore is inviting and lively with plenty of bright colours leading to a difficult information hierarchy.
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Repeating pages and multiple navigation bars making it difficult for users to discern relevant information.


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Confusing and unrelatable labels that did not clearly indicate the information within. This issue also stemmed from unorganised grouping of information.
Mapping our course of action"
Process
Narrowing on 'Parents' as the target group and understanding their obstacles
Once we had a preliminary idea of larger issues of the website we narrowed our focus on ‘Parents’ looking to learn more about the programs offered by the Girl Scouts as users of the website.

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Interview and survey
To address the issues, we conducted 3 interviews and a survey with parents/caregivers :
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Who have had their wards in the Girls Scouts,
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Presently have their children associated with them,
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Or are looking to get into it soon.
The key motivators in their information seeking patterns that came forward :
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Parents seemed to be interested in the information on the website as they were looking to have their kids spend time meaningfully.

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They mostly seeked information vetted by fellow parents and therefore communicate mostly on Whatsapp or Facebook groups. and access the website for further information on programs by Girl Scouts in their area.
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They like to be involved at some level with their child’s development in the program and therefore also look forward to participating.
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Define
Problems
User
Research
Identifying
main issues
New IA
Solution
prototypes
User tests
Final Iterations according to feedback
Research and Testing
The need to create a new Information architecture was seen through research methods including interviews, card sorting and tree-testing.
Card Sorting helped us identify users' difficulty with recognising information brackets and therefore inability to find the resources within and tree testing clued us into their mental models and the structure that could work to be more simplified and straightforward.
User Persona
Crafting a User Persona to help associate the problems and needs of users clearly.​
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Testing how discoverable the information was under the labels and if the levels in which they were arranged made sense. Tree-testing is a task based study of an information architecture wherein we discovered that pages such as ‘Safety’ and ‘Volunteer Toolkit’ were not findable and or understandable.
Assessing the content on the website to assort it into different levels of information. Three levels were identified, into which the labels could be sorted into according to specificity. An open Card Sort was conducted based upon 32 cards selected from two different levels of specificity. 
 LEVEL 1 cards were put into the sort to understand if they made sense as section headers 
 LEVEL 2 cards were put into the card sort to understand where users thought they fit in appropriately.
Key Findings
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Further consolidation of the menu options needed.
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Relabelling of titles in order to provide clear headers.
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Auditing information so that redundancy is eliminated, optimising the information-seeking experience.
Developing the new Information Architecture
After a comprehensive study through these methods, the new IA was proposed which solved for :
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better discoverability of information,
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clearer labels,
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coherent grouping of information through limiting navigation categories,
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eliminating redundant information.
and therefore easier navigation.
A competitor study with 5 non profit organisations with similarly oriented goals directed us some do's and don'ts and helped get map out user flows.
User Flows and Prototypes
Deciding on most relevant task flows and their respective optimisations keeping in mind our users' priorities. ​
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Contextualising the sitemap to make prototypes for our intended users’ task flows One of the integral task flows to be simplified turned out to be the donation task flow. 

Presenting as a pain point for busy parents as well as staff members stuck on long calls explaining the processes of donation. We decided to simplify and enhance the donation process on the website.
Low fidelity Wireframes
Contextualising the sitemap to make prototypes for our intended users’ task flows One of the integral task flows to be simplified turned out to be the donation task flow. 

Presenting as a pain point for busy parents as well as staff members stuck on long calls explaining the processes of donation. We decided to simplify and enhance the donation process on the website.
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(Fig 8) sketches visualising user flows to understand expectations and mental models
(Fig 9) Brainstorming UI
(Fig 10) Testing sketches digitally
To test out our prototype we collectively conducted 8 user tests to identify if the foundational ideas of our prototype were making sense to the users and to evaluate if they were able to navigate through it easily.


We had users complete the task on the desktop as well as the mobile version of our prototype to understand if our design decisions were consistent across the responsive screens.
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(Fig 11) A glimpse of the low fidelity prototypes we tested
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(Fig 11.a) Desktop screens
Key Findings
Keeping the user informed

On the landing page as well as the doantion page, users realised a lack of enough information to proceed with their task. Working on better organisation of information at each step would help our users use the website more satisfactorily.
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Interaction on pages

Horizontal scrolls hinder the users flow and they would much rather click into pages to have full views of categories
More understandable labelling 

Maintaining consistency and relevance of labels and relabelling them to be more relatable to users would prove helpful.
Clarifying ‘call to actions’ and making them match people’s natural mental models.
(Fig 11.b) Mobile screens
