LIGHT UP
TO LIVE:
A Website Redesign
Summary
Light Up to Live is a non-profit organization present in 48 states that helps veterans receive polychromatic light therapy to treat PTSD. We met with Light Up to Live to redesign their website with the intent of bringing in more traffic and increasing donations.
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Since veterans come from all walks of life, we focused on design choices that would enable the average adult to be able to intuitively navigate the site and seek information; thereby increasing traffic for LUTL.
Takeaway
"The site needs to be easily navigatable. We would also like a new look to attract more sponsors, visitors, and volunteers-- hopefully to raise more donations."
Goal of Interview
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Discover client pain points and reasons for bounce rate.
Problem
Users need to be able to navigate website to easily make a donation, volunteer, and learn more about polychromatic light therapy.
Solution
We will increase user engagement and minimize site abandonment with intuitive navigation, improved information architecture, digestible content, and improved visibility.
PERSONA:
Roberts David
Retired Veteran
"I want to know where to gather information on light therapy and share this information with my veteran friends"
Biography
David is a retired veteran in Morristown, NJ with his wife and two cats. He enjoys going to the park with his three grandkids and running his little ice cream truck business on the weekends.
Core Needs
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Learn about Light Therapy System
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Get his friends to volunteer and donate to LUTL
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Browse categories for certain content
Frustrations
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Doesn't know where to look for services
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Not enough info on light therapy promotes anxiety
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Too much cognitive and triggering overload
Card Sort
Task Analysis
Competitive Analysis
TESTING HYPOTHESES
Participants were asked to match content with the given categories
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User placed the subject "Making a Donation" under "Ways to Give"
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4/7 users put "light therapy" under "How we help"
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6/7 users put "Volunteer" under "Ways to Give"
To see how effective the site was in real time, we conducted a task analysis with 4 people, ages 25-65, to see if users could complete prompts with less than 2 misclicks and in less than one minute.
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User couldn't click buttons on carousel
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Nobody knew what "PLT" stood for
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Users didn't know what the site was about
We examine multiple non-profit sites specific to veterans and do a site analysis on features and elements that may have positive effect to the business' success.
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Competitors had "donate" and "volunteer" buttons visible in global navigation bar
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Community presence existed, which could be a big driver for donations
TAKEAWAY
Navigation hierarchy, naming, and information architecture needed to be improved to help users find the categories they were looking for. The following research methods were implemented in order to decide how to clearly define the categories and organize existing content, prioritizing content that is responsible for funding.
DEVELOPING
A SOLUTION
Based on our research, we wanted to demonstrate two clear paths to make a donation and where to find light therapy information, utilizing the reconstructed global navigation. We stripped the original navigation to the bare essentials and placed less-visited content to the footer. The prioritized content below addresses Light Up to Lives's mission (light therapy) and offers different ways visitors can contribute to the cause. The reconstructed global navigation proved to be more intuitive through more usability testing.
BEFORE
Original navigation listed services under category name "Join Forces", resulting in 3 misclicks
Donate button is placed in moving carousel
AFTER
We decided to condense PLT system and other services into one category named "Our Services". Originally, therapy dogs and other aid were under "Join Forces", and users were not able to find them.
Original donate button was taken out of the automatically-moving carousel and placed in the nav bar for visibility and easy access
USER INTERFACE
Promoting user memory and cognitive retention
In order to promote user memory and cognitive retention, we also made all buttons visible and consistent with shape and color (as well as more accessible via color combinations) using a cohesive design system. Text was made more digestible when placed in containers, and the carousel was manually controllable to allow users to view at their own pace. We realized later that bread crumbs would've been helpful for more intuitive browsing.
Originally, the website did not have an information page on Polychromatic Light Therapy, and many first-time visitors were confused as to what it was. We decided an information page would help educate and ease anxiety about the treatment.
We utilized bullet points and blocking to display important key points about light therapy and healing PTSD with therapeutic color scheme of blues and neutrals
FEATURE PITCH
How we can create more traffic
Lastly, a calendar feature was added to open up the idea of inviting outer communities to start their own charity events on behalf of Light Up to Live and extend their reach.
TAKEAWAY