EcoWomen Website Redesign
Role: UX Designer
Duration: 6 months, 2020
Team: Katherine Lough, UX Designer
Tools: Figma, Loop11, Google Surveys
EcoWomen is a national organization dedicated to gathering and empowering women in the environmental field and creating a professional network through local events. The National Board of EcoWomen wanted to redesign their website to boost engagement within its current community, allow for easy onboarding of new members, and be able to attract excited members to join in leadership roles - creating a more united organization.
My partner, Katherine Lough, and I set out to address these concerns as well as the unexpected end to in-person events due to COVID.
How could a new website foster membership, individual chapter identity and create new leaders?
research
EcoWomen was driven to update their website to encourage a shift in engagement from current members, and create a space that reflected a cohesive national network, but also retained and highlighted the individual character of local chapters.
We began our research conducting long form interviews with national leadership as well as members of all active chapters. We able to connect and better understand their struggles and how a new site could best serve them.
We asked members questions targeting their current use of the website, their communication with other members, chapters and leadership, and how they leverage the EcoWomen network.
In our affinity mapping we found common themes:
Communication: The current website allows users to sign up for the chapter/national listerv which acts as a catch-all for information on events, job postings and general announcements. All further contact is via email.
Chapter Isolation: Each chapter has their own website which is up to them to update with current information. The access to these individual sites is buried in secondary navigation.
Leadership Churn: Leadership positions at the chapter and national level are available, but there is no place on the website to refer interested members to understand these roles or prompts to apply.
COVID Restrictions: In March 2020 EcoWomen halted all in-person events. While chapters began to adapt, members relied on the listerv for gathering updates, and while virtual events allowed for more members to attend, the opportunity to include or collaborate with other chapters were not facilitated.
“I have not interacted with the website a ton. We use listervs and social channels and don’t use and the website isn’t necessary” -National Board Member
“There is not much chapter-to-chapter communication where we can cross compare strategies” -Chapter Leader
In an additional user survey we asked potential users their impression and further understand usability and delight of the current site. Users responded with descriptors like “boring” “simple” “wordy” and “overwhelming”.
We began to understand the user focus of what a new site could offer internally to the EcoWomen organization and to potential members by updating the visual assets and text components.
testing
After our long for interviews and survey it was important for us to understand the real life use of the website and how information is accessed. We designed usability a test with the following tasks:
Please explore local Eco Women groups
Please register for Eco Women and sign up to be a member
Please find the national leadership profiles for contact information and networking
Please find the appropriate form to sign up as a local chapter leader
Our user tasks reflected the changes the organization wanted to see in an update and the use case for interested parties finding information.
Testing results of the current EcoWomen site
Loop11 provided the task success rate as well as heat maps that reflected the movements of our users searching for information.
With the fail rate at 100% for tasks 2 and 4, and a heat map reflecting confusion on which navigation would lead to the information they were looking for.
Heat map for Task 1
We understood these results to mean the following:
EcoWomen’s website needs a style refresh that reflects the youthful exuberance of their membership and modern design concepts
Primary navigation taxonomy creates friction for users and does not reflect the information housed on the website
Technical limitations of a website build means utilizing additional technology to foster conversation and community.
design
Identifying the opportunities for change in the EcoWomen website created the following feature set for our design:
Refine primary navigation and update category language to better represent secondary navigation information
“Get Involved” becomes “Join Us”
Eliminate “Contact” and house chapter contact on chapter pages and place social links in bottom navigation
Eliminate dead link “My Account”
Create “Donate” button to prompt financial support
Fresh color scheme and visual separation of copy using the dense backlog of EcoWomen event photography
Eliminate individual chapter pages and house all chapter information and contact on ecowomen.org
Create a CTA button located on all pages to become an EcoWomen member
Expand leadership bios to include LinkedIn profiles to encourage connecting
Create a “Resource” navigation for chapter/national leadership applications and leadership portal for future password protected information
Propose an EcoWomen SLACK to foster chapter and member conversation, available to join via the EcoWomen website
Proposed Design
testing
To confirm the changes we made would make the desired positive impact we repeated our usability testing with our new design.
Please explore local Eco Women groups
Please register for Eco Women and sign up to be a member
Please find the national leadership profiles for contact information and networking
Please find the appropriate form to sign up as a local chapter leader
Testing results for proposed EcoWomen website
We were incredibly pleased by the results of this round of testing. We were able to completely reverse usability on task 2 (signing up for membership) to a 100% success rate! We were also able to increase success an additional 20% task 1 (finding EcoWomen chapters).
In addition to usability we reconnected with our interested parties via A/B testing survey to ask their impressions of the new design. They were asked to choose based on which example was more credible, learnable and accessible. 80% of our potential users chose our designs as more credible, learnable and accessible.
next steps
Due to the success of the changes we made in finding chapter information and encouraging new membership, the focus of additional work would revolve around the labeling and/or location of the EcoWomen leadership applications.
With a 100% fail rate there is plenty of room for improvement.
We were pleased with the progress of this design, and look forward to EcoWomen implementing these changes in 2021