Redesigning a charity website: 4 ways we’ve made Action for Children’s website more user-centric
At Action for Children, we protect and support children, young people and families around the UK. We make sure their voices are heard, and campaign for change.
Our website is the shop window for this work. It explains what we do — for supporters, and those who need our help. It guides potential foster carers through the application process. It gives commissioners insight into how we can make a difference in their area. It’s how people can get involved in our events, or find out about volunteering.
By early 2020, we knew our site could be doing its job better. Data on some key user journeys, feedback from teams and an audit of the site revealed that our website needed to be easier to use. So we embarked on a seven-month project to tackle this.
The MVP version of the site, launched in October 2020, is just the first step in a series of developments. But one of the first things we needed to do was make our site more user-centric. Here are some of the ways we’ve done that.
We’ve made the website easier to access
We want everyone to be able to use our website, regardless of technology or ability. We developed both our content and design with this in mind.
On content, we began by carrying out audit. We looked at how connected it was to our cause. We asked whether it was clear and easy to understand, and what purpose it was serving. At the same time, we ran workshops with teams on their key users. What did these users come to our site looking for? What were their pains and gains?
As a result, we reduced the number of pages on the site from around 2,000 to just over 400. This is a drop of 80%. By removing and merging pages, we were able to simplify journeys and help people find what they need. The only content we launched with in October was that with a clear user need and a strong connection to our work.
We also rewrote content across the site, to be understood by a wide range of literacy levels. We introduced the Hemingway app into our ways of working to support a plain English approach.
On design, we worked with the Brand team and our web agency to be ‘AA compliant’ to WCAG guidelines. We’ve complied with AAA standards where possible.
We built our new structure on user feedback
We wanted to create a new, intuitive structure for the site, informed by feedback from users. Our workshops with teams helped us draft a new structure to kick this process off.
Working with our website agency Torchbox, we then tested it with the public. The results from tree testing helped us develop the structure further. We were able to spot what wasn’t working, potential sticking points, and where to cross-link between information.
As we developed more elements of the site, we also ran usability testing to check that journeys were working as they should, we also ran usability testing to check that journeys were working as they should. Now the site is up and running, the team is looking at how we might test key journeys in more detail.
We’re championing the voices of the people we help
Our content audit showed that the voices of the people we help were largely missing from our site. 77% of the pages reviewed had no presence of either supporter or service user voice. Where these voices did exist, they weren’t integrated well throughout the content.
Based on some previous research on our target supporter audiences, we knew that our audiences want to see both emotional real-life stories and hard numbers, to help them understand the difference our work makes.
As a first step, we’ve introduced a stories section to the site, as well as quotes and stats throughout to support our content. The stories and information used on different pages is based on what we know about the type of people we want to speak to. This is an area that the charity plans to continue building on. We’ve designed some features (yet to be rolled out) to help us integrate storytelling more fully throughout.
Data on user behaviour has helped shape journeys
Knowing something about how people were behaving on our old site helped to inform decisions on user journeys, design and functionality.
We knew that around 60% (now 74%) of our user visits were from mobile, for example. So we worked with our web agency to ensure the design was mobile-first.
We were also looking at the data for our on-site events and services search function. As a charity with services and events around the UK, we want people to be able to use our site to find what’s near them. Our previous site provided a single landing page for people to search for either. But data showed that 36% of visitors to this page were leaving the site at this point. This represents more than 23,000 exits over 12 months.
One of the issues we identified was that once a user put in their postcode, the site provided a list of events and services together. This made it hard for people to find what they needed. Someone looking for a marathon, for instance, wouldn’t need to see a young carers service, and vice versa.
To address this, we’ve separated out the journeys for events and services searches . These now appear in the relevant parts of the site linked to those the appropriate user. A user can filter the services search page by both location and service type.
There’s still more work to be done to improve the experience for these users. But these were important first steps to help us meet their needs more effectively.
Ruth Stokes and Christopher Harlow were co-leads on Action for Children’s MVP website redevelopment project. They are now Content Designer for the charity’s digital parenting service, and the charity’s Campaigns and Activism Manager respectively.
