Roles: Timeline:
Digital strategist, UX researcher/designer, web designer, developer, copywriter
Jan 2021 – present
Objective
Without losing the loud and fun brand identity, redesign the website to be tailored to the target users: volunteers, individual donors, corporate sponsors, and grantmakers. Make the calls to action clear. Make the experience smooth.
Project Overview
I found the opportunity with It's Your Birthday, Inc. (IYBI) through the Taproot Foundation. IYBI is a small nonprofit in the greater St. Louis area that hosts birthday parties for kids in homeless and domestic abuse shelters. On the Taproot site, IYBI Founder Rolanda Finch had initially posted a request for a 1-hour session to discuss the possibility of a website redesign. We instantly hit it off. I was inspired by her mission, and she loved my early ideas and energy. I made the case for a redesign, and we decided to go for it.
My message to Rolanda was that her website could do more to tell IYBI's story, and it would be important to design with the website's target users—not the kids—in mind. Rolanda knew this, and she just needed help shifting gears. She is so used to showering others with cupcakes and gifts, making kids smile. That's what she does. So, that explains how all the confetti and balloons made it on the website.
But for the user—consider the middle-aged volunteer—landing on the old IYBI site was like entering through your front door to be greeted with shouts of "SURPRISE." It's startling and confusing at first. Besides, here the attention was misplaced. (Rolanda acknowledges that the organization name, It's Your Birthday, is also guilty of generalizing this way.) The user wants to give, not receive. And IYBI also wants her in that giving mindset.
Deliverables
User personas
We needed to shift the focus away from the kids for a moment and onto the target users. For this mental exercise, we created a set of user personas, based on inputs from Rolanda and some of my own research. I've learned to be wary of user personas as a design tool. Design should be based on research. In a real-world setting, introducing personas with fake photos and bios can undermine your credibility. It also gets into some weird stereotyping gray area.
In this case, though, creating vivid characters really helped Rolanda—she's a people person—and soon we were referring to the characters by name in our feature debates.
Card sort / site map
Version 3 (final)
Wireframes
Design guidelines
Build and impact
After incorporating inputs from the advisory board and other stakeholders, we finalized the site and launched it—still several days ahead of our production schedule and in plenty of time for "Give STL Day," one of IYBI's biggest fundraising opportunities of the year.
I built the site using Wix.com. There were a few "big reveal" moments where Rolanda was nearly brought to tears. Rolanda is very pleased with the site and delighted to see an uptick in website traffic and donations. In 2021, donations increased by 140%.
"This year we have seen more donations than we have seen EVER. We can credit the website [smiley emoji]."
"I noticed I now receive about a tenth of the volume of basic questions about what we do, because the website now explains this clearly."
-Rolanda Finch, IYBI Founder and Director
