
Case Study — Engineers Without Borders
Shaun Wong - Emily Crittenden - Andy Gleeson - Puriv Shah
Engineering a better User Experience for the members of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) to keep them engaged and on-board.
Member support helps not-for profit EWB to keep on doing important work in less developed communities in Australia and in the the South Pacific region. A large part of the work EWB does relies on volunteers donating their time and skills.
The Brief
- Increase capacity for membership data management to support monitoring and evaluation processes
- Engage members
- Increase collaboration between members and increase membership retention
Essentially: ‘Can you build us a portal?’
The Team
- Emily Crittenden — interviewing, contextual inquiries, performing as scrum master; primary research, the people stuff
- Andy Gleeson— project manager; keeping everyone up to date across Asana, Google Drive, Slack; the primary organiser
- Purvi Shah- research plan, personas, wireframes; the secondary researcher
- Shaun Wong- wire-frames and hi-fi prototype, essentially; the nightshift (UI)
My Role

My role was interviewing. I spoke to engineers. Many engineers later I realised that I wasn’t necessarily speaking to the right engineers pertinent to the business goal of retention. We needed some insights unavailable to us from the current list — the ex members. The client provided a list of interviewees, however they were all active current members.
I did my own research to try and find some people who were no longer members of EWB. I managed to track down a couple and inquire as to why they let their membership lapse. We gained valuable insights from these former members.
The Challenge
Tasked with designing a member portal to help not-for-profit organisation Engineers Without Borders (EWB) to engage and retain members. Without members donating their time and skills EWB would not be able to operate and had been seeing a steady decline in membership.

An added layer to this challenge was working as a team of 4 UX designers;
- agreement took longer to be reached
- we strove for collaboration over compromise
- ultimately however, this resulted in a far more considered approach to our design solutions
Research

Involved interviewing key stakeholders to establish the business needs and understand their processes to decide on the best minimum viable product to help them meet their business goals — engagement and retention.
To establish user needs I used a range of methods inclusive of user interviews and contextual enquiries. Taking a look at best practice in industry and what similar organisations in the aid sector were doing.
Examining EWB’s Google Analytics gave enormous insight into where they were getting the most traffic, what people were clicking, how long they were staying on the site and the website bounce rate.

Problem Statement
How can we increase retention rates and member engagement through the development of a member portal?
Personas
From the research 4 personas were developed; Matt the Engineer, Rose the Student, Harvey the Ex-member and Jill the Volunteer. These personas brought to life to how the member portal would work to address the needs and overcome the pain points of different types of users.

Testing

The member portal created was designed with these people in mind. Using a hi-fi prototype and testing it with users helped to test hierarchy and copywriting — was the messaging communicating the EWB story well enough on the homepage? While this was slightly outside of the scope of making a member portal, it was identified during the contextual enquiries that to enable people to onboard efficiently — hence improving the user experience — the homepage is part of that process, it acts as the portal to the portal.
User testing identified what was still needed on the homepage to get people on-boarding allowing for further refinement of the prototype.

To gauge the importance of order in the portal a card sorting exercise was used to understand what would be most important to a member using the portal.
What we did
The actual on-boarding process it-self was a single long sign up sheet. By breaking down the signup process into 6 breadcrumbed steps, we hypothesised that supporting research, which indicates that people are 160% more likely to on-board, would deliver a better user experience from the first member interaction. The main feature of the portal was the dashboard, housing all the resources and information that members needed in one place. The main goal when designing it was to personalise it in order to make it more engaging and create a better user experience.
The Solution
Housing all needed resources and information in one place; badges and volunteer hours to give a feeling of gamification as those hours go up. The calendar keeps volunteers informed and up to date with what is going on in their chapter. Members also have access to a directory with all the contacts relevant to them for organising events.

Further to the solution was cleaning up the pathway to becoming a member. The site map as it was, was confusing and the signup process was disjointed, the signup took you back to your homepage rather than taking you to the dashboard. This was fixed by linking the ‘thank you’ step onward to the dashboard.

Hi-Fidelity Prototype
Click the link to view the prototype
Afterthoughts

The thing that i was most proud of in this project was recognising that the users that our client had made available to us were not the particular user we needed to gain insight from to address one of the main business goals which was retention. I tracked down one type of the user we needed insight from, being ex-members, to find out why they off-boarded. That gave us some insight into their needs, which helped us provide further recommendations to EWB around ways to retain members.
