United Way Centraide Canada
Project: Website Redesign for the flagship National site
My Role: Lead Strategist/UX Design
Tools Used: Sketch, InVision, Axure and Jira
“United Way Centraide Canada is the national office that provides leadership, guidance and support to local United Ways across Canada. Together local United Ways and United Way Centraide Canada form the United Way Movement”
Business Goals
As national stewards for the United Way movement, the United Way Centraide Canada (UWCC) website needed to improve and better articulate to users its key areas of focus: Kids, Poverty and Community. They also needed the site to do a better job at driving communications and marketing initiatives in a more clear and effective way. Specifically they needed a site that was better adapted to really driving unique messaging for national campaigns.
Lastly, UWCC has a large amount of data and figures that illustrate its impact, both at the national and provincial level. Specifically, UWCC wanted to show the results of its fundraising efforts and the monetary impact and support it has on kids, poverty and community across Canada.
“The site is not well adapted to national marketing initiatives and single destination calls-to-action. We need the ability to express the brand better through the site”
LOUISE BELLINGHAM, VP MARKETING
Challenges
The old site was not responsive and templates and layouts within the CMS were restrictive and lacked flexibility. Each UWCC campaign has a different message, focus and set of content requirements. One of the greatest challenges was how can we provide United Way the maximum amount of templates that are flexible and modular to achieve the goals of ever changing, unique campaigns - all within budget and scope of the project. To address United Way’s “Our Impact” messaging, how could we best illustrate numerical data and figures in a visually striking yet clear and concise way
Process
After a thorough discovery session and requirements gathering session with content creators, admins and senior management I recommended a content strategy workshop and writing workshop. The content strategy workshop focused on a high level R.O.T analysis and gap analysis to identify priority communication messaging that would inform the new site architecture. I used a “hybrid” (closed) card sorting exercise to help create a new page structure and site map based on my recommended primary navigation categories. We also identified content priorities and gave them a numerical value to help guide the content creation teams to prioritize content needed at launch.
To gain final buy-in I provided United Way with a full business analysis insights presentation outlining my discovery observations and subsequent recommended approach to insure we were aligned and ready to move into sitemap and wireframes
Approach
An important business requirement was providing United Way with templates that were flexible and modular, especially for one-off campaigns. In order to mitigate against scope creep and budget over-runs I reused similar UI patterns and content modules, in different permutations, that could be turned on or off easily within the WordPress CMS.
Lastly, to tell the United Way’s “Our Impact” story, I worked with their senior communications team to help choose 4-5 of the most important data points and created a unique visually driven template with a layout similar to an infographic (that would work on all screen sizes)
Finished designs based on my original wireframes and strategy
