ADEPS Kenya
Website Redesign

Humanizing and modernizing a non-profit organization's website to increase traffic and donations.

Project Overview

Role
UX/UI Designer
Timeline
Two months, Winter 2023
Challenge
ADEPS is a non-profit organization based in Kenya. Their mission is to improve living conditions for rural communities by providing social and economic development programs.
In order to build a credible and trustworthy home for online fundraising, ADEPS required a redesigned website that made visitors feel confident they could make a difference.
Project Outline
  1. Discovery
  2. Research & Analysis
  3. Solution & Design
  4. Final Product
  5. Results
A webpage with repeated images on Kenyan children, overlayed with unreadable green text and a yellow PayPal donation button.
Before
A website homepage showing a smiling child overlayed with white text and a red button linking to the website's mission statement.
After
Jump to Final Product

Discovery

ADEPS initial website was built from scratch, and suffered from inconsistent design and user experience.
The site was the face of ADEPS’s online presence, and it’s quality was not conducive to donations.
ADEPS sought out a design team through UX Rescue to help revitalize their website. What they got was a full online facelift that lead to a massive increase in visitors.
The Opportunity
The overarching goals were to drive more traffic to the website and covert more visits into donations.
The legacy site suffered from content bloat in some areas and a complete lack of content in others, so the new website required revamped and refocused content.
As ADEPS is a non-profit, they had limited resources for site development. The design team needed to ensure the site could be built quickly by a single developer, and would be scalable to account for ADEPS’s expanding programs.
A website analytics report showing 644 weekly users.

Research & Analysis

Our research focused on comparing the legacy site to standouts in the non-profit space, understanding the content of the legacy site, developing a clear user journey, and aggregating everything into a new Information Architecture.
Competitive Analysis
Analysis of strong non-profit websites gave us direction for where to focus to improve ADEPS’s web presence.
Findings:
  1. Provide relevant and useful content to build a story users can follow.
  2. Cultivate social and emotional connection to humanize ADEPS’s mission.
  3. Develop a consistent voice and brand to build users’ confidence as they explore the site.
The homepage for BRAC, an international non-profit.
The homepage for OXFAM, an international non-profit.
The homepage for American Red Cross, a non-profit.
The homepage for Acumen, an international non-profit.
A webpage filled with long text and misaligned titles.
Content Audit
We reviewed the legacy site to understand the state of the content.
What we found were mainly inconsistencies:
  1. Some pages overflowing with content, some pages completely bare.
  2. Duplicative language and statistics.
  3. Some professional tone, and some rambling prose.
Card Sort
The Competitive Analysis and Content Audit gave us the framework we needed for a card sort.
An open card sort revealed user mental models that formed the basis of our Information Architecture.
A matrix of terms that shows the relationship of terms as voted by research participants.
A site map in the form of a tree diagram that depicts the navigations for the ADEPS website.
Information Architecture
The goal was to make it easy for users to find the information they needed to be comfortable making a donation.
Information could be clearly grouped into categories that provided users with relevant content they could explore at their own pace:
  1. About Us: a summary of ADEPS’s mission and history.
  2. Our Work: a collection of ADEPS’s core initiatives.
  3. How to Help: options to support ADEPS through partnerships or donations.

Solution & Design

With a clear set of goals and a framework for the layout of the website, we moved forward with design efforts.
This included wireframes, an updated color palette, usability testing, and improved content and structure.
Wireframes
The initial wireframes followed our Information Architecture, and gave us a first look at how the new content would present across the site.
A simple greyscale wireframe showing a hero and two content boxes.
The Kenyan flag.
A color palette showing a range of color swatches for use on a website.
Color Palette
ADEPS did not have a consistent color palette for their brand. We designed a core palette based on the colors of the Kenyan flag.
Greens were used for structure, while red was used for interactive elements. An additional yellow-tan allowed us to categorize key information such as statistics.
Testing
We conducted a moderated usability test to see how users would explore the site and process the new content.
We found from this test that users wanted a greater emphasis on three things:
  1. ADEPS’s past and current projects.
  2. The impact those projects made on real peoples’ lives.
  3. A better understanding of where their donation would go and how it would help.
This was a key turning point in the design, as it reiterated that this project was truly about helping people.
We took this feedback and refocused the content on the human element of ADEPS’s work:
  1. We pulled new statistics to show ADEPS’s measured impact.
  2. We added testimonials from real people that have benefited from ADEPS’s work.
  3. We worked with ADEPS to understand what specific dollar amounts could do for their initiatives, and made those amounts clear on the Donations page.

Final Product

A website homepage showing a smiling child overlayed with white text and a red button linking to the website's mission statement.
A webpage with text explaining ADEPS's environmental efforts, with a carousel of environmental images.
A webpage with yellow cards showing dollar amounts and what ADEPS can do with each amount.
A webpage showing ADEPS different initiatives with links to learn more about each one.
The bottom of a webpage with a hero linking to a contact form with an image of a woman smiling.
A hero linking to a contact page, with yellow cards showing statistics on ADEPS's community engagement.
A webpage for ADPES's Women Empowerment program, with a CTA to make a donation and yellow cards showing statistics of women's situations in Kenya.
A webpage linking to each of ADEPS's initiatives.
A contact form on a white background with a red 'Submit' button.

Results

ADEPS launched the new site, and immediately saw improvements in activity.
Weekly visitors of the legacy site

644

Weekly visitors of the new site

27k

Total increase

4093%

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