Farmshare
Austin
This nonprofit based in Austin, Texas received a new brand kit, brand audit and website refresh based on user research and customer surveys.arch, interviews and surveys.
This project was completed over the course of six months.
Quick View
I began this project by collecting metrics from the existing website and sending out a customer survey to gauge the effectiveness of the existing website. I also did a heuristic evaluation of Farmshare Austin's website and wrote up conclusions to present to stakeholders. Below are several slides from the shareholder presentation.
Process
Metrics
From past 90 days
A lot of information was gathered from the most recent 90 days of metrics. We learned that mobile design needed to be prioritized, as 70% of users accessed the site through those channels. We also learned which pages held users attention for the longest amount of time and which pages were searched for most often. Those pages would be prioritized first in our redesign efforts.
Website Audit
The Farmshare website needed to be built to handle multiple languages. At the time we started most of the website was inconsistent in branding, was not responsive, and was not optimized for mobile users. All of this needed to change.
Industry Audit
6 Competitor Websites
I audited 6 websites from the same industry and region as Farmshare Austin. These are sites that the nonprofit identified as competitors or organizations they admired. Because most of these websites are representing small non-profits, there was a lot of range in capabilities and what the sites offered.
Define & Synthesize
Design Goals
After this first analysis of the organizations website I put together a long list of design goals and a plan of action. Farmshare Austin uses Wix as their hosting platform so I also did research into what the technical capabilities and limitations are before building a design system.
At this point I touched base with the major stakeholders for Farmshare Austin and got approval to move forward in the design phase based on the conclusions reached from research and analysis.
Information
architecture
Brand Kit
I built new information architecture for the site based on the most active and important pages. This would restructure the site to an extent.
Farmshare specifically asked for a brand kit so I built them one. They started with roughly 14 fonts across the website and three main colors. I wanted to keep their existing logo but add consistency to their designs and strengthen their color palette.
DESIGN Phase
WIX LIMITS
Tech constraints
Organization Limits
Workflow
Offline Wireframes
Because Farmshare uses WIX as their web hosting platform I spent time learning what my design and technical limitations would be within the software.
Many people from this non-profit manage their website. Because of this creating new designs and pages can get messy and confusing. I decided to create draft versions of specific pages offline and gradually move them into WIX so as not to interrupt the teams' workflow.
Before designing in WIX I made wireframes of how I wanted each page to be laid out. These wireframes can also serve as templates for Farmshare to help them learn how each section of the page should/can be used moving forward.
Building Online
From the wireframes I moved online building draft pages that could be tested against the original pages to see what users feel more comfortable with. Below are some comparisons of original pages and the modified designs.
Improvements
The biggest improvement to the site is that all of the redesigned pages are responsive, and have multilingual capabilities. These were two big asks from the company.
Mobile First
All of the pages are also designed to be viewed on mobile devices, which are preferred by over 60% of the organizations' users.
To be continued...