Project Overview
Charity search needed to provide a more accurate and trustworthy way for customers to find the charity they are looking for. We also wanted to grow the amount of money going to charity through this product. Customers needed to be able to filter their options to find the charity they are looking for too as not everyone has a particular cause they wish to donate to from the outset.
My contribution
- Initial research and stakeholder workshop to define design direction and aims from the stakeholder team
- Identified content and innovative features to enable full scoping of designs and build phase
- Created low-fidelity initial page concepts based on the workshop outputs
- High level testing report including recommendations around how to improve the design based on testing feedback
- High fidelity prototype ready to hand over to my development team
- Design documentation and interactive/responsive behaviour notes as required by my development team to aid the build process
- Final presentation to CAF stakeholders
User testing
The feedback I got was invaluable. Almost all users immediately went to the search box to begin the tasks. Only one participant wanted to browse instead, but she represented a distinct use case as her giving habits were more akin to a hobby. Almost all understood the autocomplete dropdown would go to a profile page, apart from one who thought it would go to the charity’s website.
The affordance of the branches toggle was not sufficient to draw the user’s attention, leading them to scroll up and down the page. Some said they “scanned past it” but then they were not actively looking for such an element, rather they were scanning for the word “Scotland”. Many of them would either refine the search term to add “Scotland”, and half would have used the Location tool in the filters bar to further refine the search. Charity number also caused some confusion with some users thinking it was the number of time the charity had been searched (“hits”).
The term “income” as a metric did not make sense, and was confused with “the income you need to donate to this charity”. That pound icons were used to visualise this added to the confusion, with some users mentally connecting it with the pound icons on Yelp, which denote how expensive a restaurant is. One said “income is a funny word”. The majority of participants expected to click on the charity name to view the profile page, which was good.
Recommendations
- revised the terminology and iconography on the “Explore” section.
- made the affordance of the button more obvious.
- as a fallback option, on the HQ profile page, added a “Did you know you can donate to local branches of this charity?” with a mini-listing of regional branches, with the option to paginate or show all / load more.
- kept filter bars, as many users expected there be a means to further refine results.
- added label to explain the meaning of the Charity Number.
What did they think of the “shopping basket” feature giving to multiple charities?
When clicking donate some expected to go straight to the donations journey, and were perturbed when introduced to the basket concept. One said “It’s not really something that's crossed my mind… not a train of thought I'd had before” but it was “good to see” and they “might use it in the future”. Our youngest participant got it straight away, saying that it would “encourage you to make new donations” but our oldest participant missed it altogether. One participant thought it strange to add something to the basket before deciding on a donation amount.
Would they donate to multiple charities in the same session?
Because the concept was new, participants had an ambivalent attitude to it partly because their intent was to make a single donation to a single charity. However, once they had reflected on the idea they began to see the benefit, especially once they saw the idea of building a donations history. It was inconclusive whether it would make them donate more. We continue to test the shopping basket concept with existing customers and are looking at refining the concept of multiple donations in line with the user intent of making a single donation.
For example, if they donate to a large charity like Cancer Research UK, suggest two smaller charities at the next step. “Do you want to make donations to smaller charities in this area” with a list of relevant causes and a randomised reload button for charities in this category.
