EMPHASIZING YWCA'S IMPACT AS A DRIVER OF CHANGE

Established in 1897, the YWCA Metro Vancouver supports women and families while advocating for women’s equality. Unfortunately, an outdated website was difficult to navigate and didn’t adequately address the scope and impact of the YWCA’s advocacy work, a crucial factor in attracting donors.

The goals of the YWCAVan.org website re-design were to emphasize the YWCA’s impact as a driver of change in the pursuit of social and economic equality for women in order to attract new donors, while at the same time ensuring their programs and services are easy to find and understand by those who need them.

Spatial led the YWCA team through a human-centred design process to define a new UX strategy and information architecture based on their audience’s perspectives.

Key to the project success was a design approach that supported key messaging content and campaign structure based on user journeys representing diverse audience groups and stakeholders. Development continues on the website with a launch planned for 2021.

THE WORK

Setting the stage with stakeholders

Spatial was engaged by the YWCA to redesign three websites: YWCAMetroVan.org, the non-profit programs and advocacy site, as well as the YWCA Hotel and Health +Fitness websites.

The project started by bringing all stakeholders together to confirm the objectives and goals of the project and engage different departments in the work to come. Spatial presented the results of our initial heuristic analysis and audience interviews to gain consensus on the design priorities for the project, and facilitated a dive into audience needs.

Envisioning a new online experience from the audience perspective

As a result of the discovery work Spatial created three key audience personas. The project stakeholders were brought together again in a workshop to define three important user journeys for the new website. Thinking through the desired journeys for program users, volunteers and donors from the persona perspective highlighted key opportunities for the website to improve communication and support service delivery in the short and long term.

Establishing a UX strategy and conceptual designs

With these journeys in mind, Spatial defined a new information architecture and content model to inform communications via the new website. The content model was based on four principles: Accessible; Contextual; Inform; and Inspire. The information architecture and design concepts were then created to illustrate how content, communications priorities and visual design would be brought together to bring the principles to life. The content model and conceptual designs formed the basis of the UX strategy.

An iterative approach refines design while engaging stakeholders in the result

With an established UX strategy, we embarked on an iterative design phase where conceptual designs continued to be evolved into a final design package. The UX strategy and visual design iterations were continually reviewed with the developer team and broader stakeholder groups for feedback and buy-in along the way, with a final round of usability testing with end users. The final deliverable was a design packages including a new visual design direction, detailed UX specs for developers and a content planning workshop with the YWCA team. The end results was general excitement about the new direction for the team’s brand online.