Pardis Taherzadeh
Managing, Mentoring, and Motivating Youth through Designing a Nonprofit's Digital Identity
A website for the New Millennium Movement Foundation
ROLE
This is a team project where I assumed the UX-UI designer role.
DELIVERABLES
Wireframe
Sitemap
Personas
Competitive analysis
TOOLS
Figma
Adobe Photoshop
DATE
June 2021
August 2021
Overview
The New Millennium Movement (N2KM) engaged us to craft their digital strategy and redesign their website. We refined their message architecture and structured their content, which served as the starting point to design a responsive identity site that positions N2KM for the future.
We designed and shipped this responsive website within a tight design and web development timeline of 3 weeks.
A responsive website for the New Millennium Movement
This is a story about how a website design effort became the catalyst for a nonprofit organization to crystalize its future goals and objectives.
New Millennium Movement is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to equip youth with the tools and resources needed to maximize their opportunities and potential.
They have developed a three-step process to assist them in bridging the gap between their hopeful aspirations and their goals for success through Managing, Mentoring, and Motivating their selected skill set to reach their maximum potential.
PROBLEM SOLVING
Challenge
Users need a way to access timely content because the current website is not purposeful, lacks consistency, and all information is categorized chaotically.​
THINKING & BRAINSTORMING
Strategy & Approach
By designing an accessible, responsive, and informative website for possible users, we will be able to provide sufficient details that extend to a higher reach of people.
RESULT
Final Experience
We re-designed the current New Millennium Movement website to provide individuals with more meaningful information about services, programs and easy ways to get involved. This would help establish trust and confidence in N2KM, increase awareness, and ultimately empower individuals to get involved.
Key Objectives
After several meetings, phone calls, and video conferences with the stakeholder, we came up with the following primary goals for the site:
GOAL 1
A digital Identity
The site will convey the New Millennium Movement’s vision, mission and impact to the general public as well as to the four main groups that the New Millennium Movement interacts with: Students, Parents of participants, Volunteers and Educators, Donors.
A digital Identity
The site will convey the New Millennium Movement’s vision, mission and impact to the general public as well as to the four main groups that the New Millennium Movement interacts with: Students, Parents of participants, Volunteers and Educators, Donors.
GOAL 2
A hub for interaction
The site will consolidate all New Millennium Movement related information in one digital repository. It will act as a centralized hub that collects traffic from various social media platforms. Besides, it encourages youth to use services and get help from the New Millennium Movement which leads to enhancing skills for their career goal
Research
Who Are We Desiging for?
After speaking to the stakeholders of the organization, we determined that our primary audience comprises four groups: Students, Parents of participants, Volunteers or Educators, Donors.
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Here are the four personas that represent each group:
We conducted the heuristic evaluation, competitive analysis, and organizing information activity to build the navigation based on the validated findings.
Heuristic Evaluation
In order to find the usability problems in user interface design of the current website we conducted Jakob Nielson’s 10 heuristics.
Competitive Analysis
We looked to several nonprofit organization websites to study how they position themselves in the digital space and compare them with the New Millenium Movement's website before the redesign.
We chose to analyze deeply four of the direct competitors; "Mentoring", "Friends for Youth", "YMCA" and " Build on". All the competitors stood out for their focus on mentoring and empowering the youth generation.
We analyzed the way each one communicates their identities through their websites.
The most immediate trend we observed was the difference in the appearance of the competitor’s websites to N2KM's website before the redesign.
Other important features being offered by competitors were donation pages/forms on the website, multiple ways to give back/get involved.
New Millennium Movement (N2KM) Website before the Redesign
Strengths:
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They choose smiling photos of their members that show their impact on the community.
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The slideshow of high-quality photos featured on the homepage banner attracts the eye of site visitors.
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They highlight the organization’s statement of impact on their homepage. Their website makes this clear by incorporating design features like eye-catching imagery and convenient calls-to-action.
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Organizations' websites utilize captivating videos and imagery to convey their mission and communicate their various programs and services.
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Their navigation menus are in a clean format and the most important pages like the Donate page are highlighted with colorful buttons.
Weaknesses:
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They do not have engaging design elements including smooth mouse-over effects and dynamic media galleries.
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They are without a fixed navigation bar that does not appear when the user scrolls up and downwards.
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They use color and photography to tell an effective story but there is an inconsistency in the size, space, and shape of the buttons and texts.
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These nonprofit websites don't offer a web accessibility feature in color and contrast.
Competitive Analtsis table
Ideate & Design
Structure
We began to define the functionality, content, and site navigation through redesigning the sitemap.
We were able to narrow down the scope of the website design effort and convey it in this preliminary sitemap. We made every effort to make sure that a piece of information is never more than three levels deep.
