A New Donate Site Homepage
InterVarsity’s first Product Manager + Product Designer collaboration
About a year ago, InterVarsity hired its first ever product manager for our Donate site, Andy Wong. For his first few months, we did user testing with interviews, Hotjar recordings, and looking through Google Analytics, and now we were ready to actually start making changes to the Donate site!
The Workshop
While the ultimate goal was to generate a backlog of items to work on, we also needed to get the group of stakeholders used to work with a product manager and a product designer, so we held a collaborative 1-day Design Workshop.
- History Mapping — Andy, along with many others were new and we used this time to let everyone understand the history. This was especially insightful as we learned no major work had been done to the Donate site since 2011, other than bug fixes and the small changes I made in 2018.
- User Research and Personas — Andy played a few clips from research we had found to remind us who we were thinking for.
- Ideation Round 1 — I knew that those who weren’t new had spent a lot of time thinking of ideas they wanted to see in the new Donate site. To clear the way for a different prompt, we started with a general question: “What ideas do you have for the donate site?” These we saved to populate the backlog later.
- Ideation Round 2 — In our research we found that there were donors who wanted to give more, so we narrowed in on ideas that would allow donors to see more of what they could give to at InterVarsity.
- Theming– The ideation was fantastic — we had everything from a potential marketing campaign, to having “related ways to give” on profile pages, to having a new discovery section — and we took these and grouped them into themes to see if this would spark anything else.
- Wireframing– While everyone else took a break, Andy and I looked through the ideas to see which ones should be fleshed out more to help us think through which ones should be at the top of the backlog. 2 ideas were selected — donation profiles and a new homepage– and the group was broken up to either storyboard or wireframe their idea further.
Results of the Sprint
We took in a lot of great ideas from the Round 1 that we’re holding in the backlog, but from Ideation Round 2, we landed on redesigning the homepage.
Redesign the homepage
Originally, the Donate site was designed with the simplicity of Google Search. You came here, you searched, you gave, boom.
A New Homepage
Getting to Here
You’ll notice this is quite a bit more than just allowing donors to see additional accounts. I started by re-reviewing some of the user research to see if not only we could allow users to discover more of InterVarsity, but to also answer questions they immediately had when they landed on the site like:
- Is my gift tax-deductible?
- What exactly does InterVarsity do?
- Can I trust giving to InterVarsity?
New Logged-in Experience
We also had an opportunity to do something brand new where we could give a different experience to donors who were logged in and get them straight to managing their gifts.
What you see above only came to be after several rounds of revisions and user-testing.
We discovered that people really loved being able to manage their gifts right away, coupled with the new discover section below, they were able to find new ways to give as well.
Results
This new homepage has been live for 5 months exactly, and since then we’ve seen $39,000 in additional donations to accounts that donors can now discover.
Shoutouts
Big thanks to these wonderful people I get to work with:
- Andy Wong, our new Product Manager.
- Paul Utley and Mary Massey, our developers.
- The several donors who gave their time and insights to help uscreate the end result.
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Ashley Crutcher is the Director of Experience Strategy at InterVarsity located in Madison, WI. She tweets at @ashleyspixels and enjoys cuddling with her furkiddos, crocheting/knitting, ringing handbells, and thinking too much about everything.
