March for Babies (MFB) is the fundraising arm of March of Dimes that develops fundraising initiatives aimed at addressing America's maternal and infant health crisis.
Opportunity
The current dashboard experience has its highest engagement during the walks season, the most popular event, and significantly drops off the rest of the year. Even then, the conversion from registrants to fundraiser participants is low.
Results and Impact
I collaborated with another designer, a digital strategist, a project manager, and development team to redesign the dashboard and onboarding experience.
We addressed visual accessibility issues, improved guidance throughout the fundraising process, and created a more personalized, mission-driven fundraising experience.
The client was happy with the results and projected it would increase year-round engagement and conversion to active volunteer status.
SPRINT PLANNING
What is Our Sprint Challenge?
Given the short timeline for this project, we decided to run a modified 4-day design sprint with the MFB team to quickly ideate solutions and prioritize what concepts should be further developed.
To determine our focus for the sprint, we interviewed 3 key members from the March for Babies team who were very familiar with the website.
This helped us gain insights into the organization’s short and long-term strategies and the primary users to be able to define the sprint problem.
RESEARCH
What Works and What Needs Improvement?
We wanted to ground the sprint team in thinking from the users’ perspective, so we conducted research to challenge assumptions and understand the barriers users faced when using the site and what actions they are looking to take.
We each performed a heuristic evaluation based on the Nielson Norman principles and interviewed 5 individuals who had participated in at least one fundraising event to cross-check if any usability issues may be contributing to some of the pain points users were experiencing.
“I really only know how to use March for Babies if somebody sends me a specific link to something on the website, other than that I feel like it's really hard to like find what you're looking for.” -Interviewee
During our stakeholder conversations, we learned that the 3 key user journeys on the site were registering a team, recruiting team members, and participating as an individual fundraiser.
I focused on evaluating those user journeys on mobile and desktop to identify problems with the interface design and visual accessibility that could impact performance.
Cross-Referencing with User Behavior
In synthesizing all of our insights, I uncovered some reoccurring themes between the heuristic evaluation and user interviews. This helped highlight certain areas that we should focus on discussing further during the sprint.
Key Issues
DESIGN SPRINT
What Ideas Can We Brainstorm Together?
With a better understanding of our users, we ran the design sprint to align on what features were required for the upcoming launch and what could be explored in the future.
The MFB team’s diverse expertise provided additional perspectives and helped fill in information gaps.
I worked with the strategist to plan and facilitate activities like user journey mapping and storyboarding.
How might we improve the website user experience in order to deepen the level of engagement, foster community, and turn MFB into a year-round movement?
Making Design Decisions
As a sprint team, we identified opportunities to engage users before and after the primary walk event and organized them into common themes. We evaluated these groupings based on user impact, business strategy, and feasibility to establish our key design priorities.
DESIGN
What is the Solution?
I pieced together all of our priority ideas and concepts to sketch out a cohesive solution that included all the critical touchpoints we discussed in the sprint. I converted my sketches into greyscale wireframes for stakeholder approval.
Connecting Users to the Mission
While designing, I had to consider that users would have varying levels of understanding, either visiting the site directly or being directed from the national March for Babies site.
I redesigned the onboarding flow by providing distinct pathways for individual fundraisers, team members, and team captains to guide them through the information they need right at the start.
I also added affinity questions that highlight the impact of selecting various fundraising activities by sharing stories and statistics. This was to connect users to the mission in a way that felt personal to them.
Individual vs Team Captain
Previously, there was little to no distinction between the content for individual fundraisers and team captains. I redesigned the external fundraising pages to delineate this content.
I expanded the current donation page to act as a template for all events, which helps keep information consistent and builds upon the March framework.
We also reformatted the content to be more focused on the user’s story and why their fundraiser is important to better connect outsiders with the March for Babies mission and community.
Guiding Users Through Fundraising
I redesigned the dashboard to be more modular based on key actions. I added a checklist module for easy-to-complete key actions that provide the next steps for new users to start engaging right away.
For returning users, this module serves as a step-by-step guide to fundraising and provides opportunities after a walk is over to continue engagement.
To show that users are making an impact and to motivate them to engage long-term, I added a year-over-year review and fundraising updates.
USER TESTING
Can Users Navigate the Updated Experience?
I conducted usability tests with 5 participants to assess the functionality of the redesigned prototype. They found the experience easier to use and navigate and that the onboarding “holds your hand” which validated our decision to add more steps.
The biggest insight we heard was that users needed more context to complete some key activities like messaging team members.
To address this, we redesigned the step-by-step module to show more key actions and be more detailed with descriptions.
HANDOFF
What Do Stakeholders Need for Implementation?
March of Dimes was in the process of updating its brand guidelines and since this is typically a lengthy process for such a large nonprofit, we had to be selective about what was in high-fidelity. I presented our prototype with the reasoning behind the components and how they might influence the visual design, ensuring their internal team could apply the new style guide effectively.
Reflection
Challenges
Due to limited communication with the developers, I struggled to determine the time needed to build each component, which led to overestimating their capacity. I could have done a better job of setting expectations with the developers early on.
I had never collaborated with a 10-member team in a virtual workshop setting before, but being part of this redesign, I learned how to navigate planning and facilitating a design sprint. The website designs are live and helping volunteers get involved with an incredible cause!
What If…
It would have been interesting to interview users who are familiar with March of Dimes but haven’t participated in a March for Babies fundraising event to see if there are any barriers to participating as a new user. This approach would help us identify the needs of users who don’t have such a high affinity for the organization yet.
Our project goals were not numerically structured, so given the chance, I would have determined the rate of conversion to participant to see how it changes over time.
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