TL;DR
Small Non-profit w/ limited resources looking to update their website and modernize their brand image.
ADA design considerations and Style Guide
Information Architecture
CMS recommendations based on org needs/abilities
We Can Ride
We Can Ride (WCR) is a small organization that provides Equine Assisted Therapies to differently-abled people. Their clients have a range of diagnoses that make them eligible for therapy services with costs mostly covered by grants from the government. I was fortunate to partner with April Harding on this project . She and I worked together on the initial research and final designs while dividing our deliverables promised in the Design Brief. When we connected with WCR, they were on the precipice of a website and brand redesign.
Remote stakeholder interview
Managing content more effectively
The current WCR website is running on an old Wordpress template with outdated plugins that frequently brake entire sections of the website. During our stakeholder interviews, we spoke with 3 board members who described their website as “heavy and “dark” and helped us understand the many issues they had with it. During interview sessions, the participants shared the concern that the people updating their websites weren’t the most “tech-savvy” and wanted to ensure that our recommendations were going to benefit them for 5-10 years from now.
“The website is heavy, clunky and difficult to update”
Mirroring their inclusive message in the redesign.
After an initial heuristic analysis, using Sketch plugins, we determined the website was not AA or AAA compliant. Some examples of this were the form fields, the contrast, and the font size. We Can Ride’s main purpose is to help the differently-abled community, this non-compliant site really undermined the organization's message of inclusivity and ally-ship. We determined that this was the largest area of opportunity and committed to designing with AAA compliance in mind. Through a recommendations and findings report and a presentation, we suggested simple, but meaningful designs that would give the organization a clear direction when moving toward their redesign.
Remote donor interviews
Professionalism and horses
During an interview session with a board member of the organization, she mentioned “the website didn’t portray a serious and professional tone, if we want the clients families to trust us with their loved ones, we need to find a way to show that through the look and feel of the website”. She mentioned multiple times that the website needed to look professional and also more modern. April and I understood understood that WCR doesn’t have the resources to hire a dedicated developer so delivering beautiful page mockups would be a lost effort. Realistically, this organization would be using another Wordpress theme with more modern plugins to replace their current website. We chose to focus our energy on a design guidebook that would give them practical suggestions to guide decisions for improving their future website. In our design guidebook, we suggested a typeface that would fit the redesign as well as an expanded color palette to allow the designer options to ensure AAA contrast would be achievable. We also suggested ADA compliant plugins to manage their forms.
“the website doesn’t portray a serious and professional tone, if we want the client’s families to trust us with their loved ones, we need to find a way to show that through the look and feel of the website”
“I’m here for the horse pictures”
While interviewing We Can Ride volunteers, equine enthusiasts that weren’t a part of WCR and participants that identified as frequent donors, we asked them to look through the old website and tell us what they thought of it. One sentiment we heard during those interviews, time and time again, was the lack of images. We learned that this was the case because the staff struggled to update the website without breaking it. The text to image ration needed to be addressed.
Recommended redesign of home page
We suggested a hero image, an oversized banner image at the top of a website, it serves as a user's first glimpse of the organization and included an immediate call to action-donate now! We also suggest the website redesign include a plugin that would integrate their social media feeds, this would help a small org like WCR by giving the site some updates more frequently. Volunteers mentioned all the horse images on the site are old. Integrating social media feeds into the site would give the users new images to look at when visiting the website. Our recommendations were built around a timeframe to give the organization an impression of when and how often to make changes.
How about the Volunteers?
We Can Ride has a team of 500 dedicated volunteers that make up most of the horsepower in the organization. They are a very passionate bunch that care deeply about the organization. We heard many mentions of the importance of the volunteer community by the stakeholders. While this message was loud and clear during volunteer interviews, it wasn’t very obvious when visiting the website. During our stakeholder interviews, we heard them mention they wanted to learn more so we chose to incorporate a shared learning resource page for the volunteers. It became clear that we needed to promote the volunteers and their efforts behind WCR through a Community Page that wasn’t currently on the website. This new page we proposed will offer a password-protected Volunteer Community page with a volunteer schedule, ways to share their experiences for an opportunity to be highlighted on the organization's blog or social media, and resources for further reading about equine therapy. The goal of the page will be to reiterate the value these volunteers bring to the organization by providing a space for them to celebrate their successes and grow in their interests.
Research methods
Being in a design team of two made for lots of opportunities for scrap-y research methods. Unfortunately for us, we weren’t able to visit the barn or the horses, because we were in week 3 of the shelter in place orders in Minnesota due to the Covid-19 outbreak. We didn’t let that stop us from doing research and managed to conduct all of our usability tests remotely. Through a simple remote card sorting exercise, we learned the taxonomy specifically in the main navigation was confusing to the users. The term ‘services’ was chosen by 29 of the 34 card sorting participants as the parent category for the equine therapy listing. WCR’s original main navigation (the before) and our proposed update influence by our remote card sort results (the after). After interviewing multiple participants that mentioned they only use the website to find WCR’s social media links, we also suggested a new footer that would give the user a layout of the general site structure.
Remote Card sorting exercise
Proposed Main Navigation Header
Proposed Footer
In Conclusion
In our client presentation, we suggested they use a Wordpress theme with updated plugins that will help them integrate social media, HIPPA compliant forms, and payment plug-ins for clients and donors. Our updated color palette and new typeface suggestions will help modernize the overall look and feel as well as help WCR to design with AAA compliance. A new community page will give the volunteers a place of their own with learning resources and other tools to help the organization be more efficient during scheduling. This redesign approach offered by April and me will prepare them for another 10 years of volunteer horsemanship. Please consider donating to We Can Ride organization, they have done great work for the Minnesota community and now, more than ever, they could use your help.