Collaborators: Melanie Cho (Design/Marketing), Tania Rivas (Marketing), Maria Garcia (Marketing) and Daniel Lara (Marketing)

Overview

WeXL (pronounced “We Excel”) is a non-profit organization that helps diverse underrepresented creators to showcase their talent and work. They recruit, nurture, and empower creative talents from their local community. How might we provide a platform that is easy to navigate and conveniently access all information about these creators?

In our redesign of WeXL’s website, my team and I explored ways to help the cluttered and outdated website while placing appropriate content to drive traffic to pages that would best serve the user. We also wanted to link all social media accounts to the website to give users easy access to follow their favorite creators.

People Problem

“As a college new grad, I want to know how I can connect with a mentor to help jumpstart my career in the media industry. Because this website is so cluttered and outdated, it makes me feel overwhelmed and anxious when looking for a creator I can relate to. I want WeXL’s website to be easier to navigate so that I can do comprehensive research on who I should connect with. ”

Competitive Analysis

We explored other non-profit organization websites to compare it to WeXL’s website. What do these website have that we don’t?

1. Compassion

   • Compassion’s website demonstrated easy navigation for consumers to gather any information they need

   • Direct copy and bold call to actions (CTAs) — i.e. “Sponsor a Child Today!”

2. Make-A-Wish

   • Strong social media presence that is demonstrated through their campaign slogans — i.e. “Together, we create life-changing wishes for children with critical illnesses”

   • WISH campaign grants a wish on average every 34 minutes

3. Kiva

   • Website has great copy that is friendly and welcoming, which gives the user comfort as they’re explore the page

   • CTA — “Start lending” doesn’t pressure the users to pull out their wallet and give right away

We used this research to gain more understanding of how we can approach our redesign for WeXL’s website. What can we do to be more approachable to the users?

WeXL User

In this phase, we focused on creating personas that represented WeXL users.

Our findings led us to create Janice and Matthew, who represent two different types of WeXL website user:

Wireframes

Our redesign started with a pen and paper wireframes to test our design ideas. This helped us develop various concepts to work with and understand our possible user.

Low Fidelity Design

We used Sketch to visualize how the redesign idea will demonstrate a better flow. This sketch showed if the navigation was efficient and convenient for the user.

High Fidelity Design

After exploring different options, we finalized the design.

Takeaways

Our greatest challenge was redesigning a website for an estimated target audience with limited content provided by WeXL. The website platform being used by WeXL had templates that were limited and only allowed simple designs to be changed. Some takeaways from this project were:

1. We had a great time working on this redesign, which demonstrated our design skills and technique

2. We learned that flexibility is the key to success, since not all design ideas will translate exactly how you envision it

3. We would like to add features such as the social media sidebar, “Learn More” button to decrease the word usage and clicking or place the mouse on the images to see a description