Truth Be Told Case Study

Project Goals

Truth Be Told is a nonprofit organization that provides personal development programs for incarcerated women. They want to update their website to attract new partners interested in implementing TBT's programs.

Problem

Truth Be Told's site does not engender trust in TBT's programs because programming and organizational details are missing or hard to find.

WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?

Site lacks details potential partners want to see before adopting TBT's programs.

The desired information is not well organized, ambiguous and is hard for users to find.

The UI has broken links and appears out of date.

Solution

Add missing content and redesign the information architecture to attract donors and program coordinators of potential partners.

HOW TO SOLVE IT

Reorganize and centralize information about TBT's leadership and governance for easier access.

Include more student and graduate stories, success metrics and program details.

Add more photos, videos and/or testimonials to visually engage users.

Update the UI's styling and design, fix broken links and remove/relocate elements that are distracting and/or add cognitive load for the users.

Research

Understand Baseline User Impression...

A Heuristic Analysis of the homepage's features revealed many opportunities for improvement - update broken links, reorder visual hierarchy, prioritize CTAs.

Truth Be Told Home Page

A Comparative Analysis of the site's features showed the site lacks some donation options and details about program outcomes compared to similar sites.

Analysis of site features comparing Truth Be Told and similar nonprofit websites

A Contextual Inquiry revealed that users broadly understand the site's mission but who the programs are for is unclear.

Identify User Pain Points

Donors Affinity Map Excerpt

Program Coordinator Affinity Map Excerpt

In User Interviews, both nonprofit program coordinators and donors described funding as the deciding factor for the adoption of new programs.

Nonprofits rarely adopt whole programs from other organizations but they will look to other nonprofits for inspiration.

Nonprofits often partner with other organizations but need their board's approval for funding.

80% of a nonprofit's funding comes from 20% of their donors (usually the high net worth donors).

Both donors and program coordinators need to see an organization's board of directors, staff, success metrics & story.

High net worth donors typically donate through a Donor Advised Fund (DAF).

Two types of users are likely to access Truth Be Told's site:

Primary User

Secondary User

Task Flows of both users

Reorganize Information Architecture

Pages were reorganized to group similar content together, additional pages were added to provide more information on the organization and programs and CTAs used to promote users' task flows.

comparison of current site and redesigned site's information architecture

Building the Prototype

Features evolved through each iteration from sketches to lo-fi wireframes and then hi-fi prototype:

Donate Block

Includes more options to give small and large donations, including: a DAF option, setup recurring donations and "donate as a gift"

Homepage

Showcase's Truth Be Told's story and directly links to program pages with multiple donate CTAs.

Who We Serve

HIghlighs graduate stories, with program statistics and outcomes.

Our Story

Consolidates all of Truth Be Told's story elements into one page for easier consumption.

Financials

A new page identified by donors as important when considering partnerships with new organizations, builds trust through transparency.

Programs

Each program's page is built out with more details on each program, success stories and more comprehensive curriculum details.

Hifi Prototype

Walkthrough the hifi prototype, from the Donor (Primary User's) POV.

click through prototype here

Test

Test & Iterate

100% of users successfully navigated the new site according to the donor and program coordinator's task flows, validating the new information architecture.
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50% of users expressed wanting more statistics on program outcomes, so we designed a new page:

Outcomes

This additional page consolidates the success metrics of all Truth Be Told's programs for a high level overview of global program success.

Remarks

Next Steps

Retest hi-fi prototype to validate addition of new Outcomes page

Update site assets with high resolution images

Test UX Copy to enhance user experience

A/B Test donation features and CTA locations

What I Learned

Though the challenge appeared to be straight forward (update the website to attract new partners interested in adopting TBT's programs), our research revealed that there is no direct design solution to address the business goal.

The best solution at the time required balancing the stakeholders' high level goals and multiple users' pain points. In order to communicate this effectively, a UX designer must:

(1) identify assumptions that will guide initial explorative research,
(2) structured hypotheses to inform design decisions, and
(3) validate design solutions early with testing