Building Trust Through Clarity
Redesigning the Global Justice Ecology Project Website
The Global Justice Ecology Project is a non-profit addressing social, ecological, and economic injustice while amplifying voices from the frontline.
Project Overview
The Problem:
The Global Justice Ecology Project’s (GJEP) website was struggling to effectively attract, engage, and retain online donors. From 2021 to 2023, total online donations dropped by an average of 10.54%, with annual donations declining by 18.35%.
The Goal:
Utilize research to drive the redesign of the main pages of the current Global Justice Ecology Project website in order to help enhance users’ understanding of their mission, reinforce overall trust towards the organization, and increase engagement with the website to attract more online donors.
Success Criteria:
- Users can clearly describe the mission of GJEP after spending time on the website.
- Users trust the organization enough to take supportive actions, such as donating or subscribing to the newsletter.
- Users can easily navigate the website to find specific information related to GJEP’s causes and projects.
Project Duration: February 2024 – July 2024
Project Timeline: Two phases, each divided into four sprints
My Role:
Lead UX designer responsible for:
- Aligning UX expectations with business goals
- Leading a remote team through a website redesign
- Generating user stories, user flows, and research scenarios
- Developing wireframes, mockups, and prototypes
Collaboration:
- Team of five UX Designers
- Worked with PM, strategy, UXR, and UXW to align UX expectations and deliverables with business goals
- Met with GJEP’s VP of Product and web developer to ensure designs met standards and capabilities
Discovery Research: Key Insights
Users struggled to identify the main focus of the organization. Some believed it was a news outlet, others thought it was academic, and some saw it primarily as a fundraising platform. This lack of clarity diluted GJEP’s identity.
Design Solutions: Clarity, Trust, and Engagement
Structuring for Focus:
To help users quickly find information, the team created dedicated landing pages for each item in the navigation menu. This improved the site’s information hierarchy and made navigation clearer, allowing users to focus on key organizational efforts.
Emphasizing GJEP’s Mission and History:
In the redesign, I prioritized prominently displaying GJEP’s mission, goals, history, and accomplishments. GJEP was celebrating its 20th anniversary, but users were unaware of the organization’s key achievements. The new design highlighted this history, showing the impact of GJEP over two decades.
Increasing Donation Transparency:
One major user concern was the lack of information about how donations were used. To address this, the donation page was redesigned with infographics and descriptions that outlined how the funds are allocated, making the process more transparent and trustworthy. This approach aimed to alleviate users’ hesitancy in contributing financially to GJEP’s mission.
Modernizing the Visual Design:
The overall website design was modernized to create a more professional and inviting appearance. The updated design elements and consistent UI were implemented to instill trust, reinforce GJEP’s credibility, and make the site more visually engaging while increasing accessibility.
Usability Testing: Refining the Experience
I collaborated with the UX research team to develop a usability test plan focused on user expectations, navigation, and content understanding.
The research findings included feedback on:
At this point I started meeting with the UX Writing team to discuss if the verbiage of the Mission, Vision, and Goals could be causing some of the confusion.
Design Solutions: Improved Navigation and Content Presentation
Revised Information Architecture:
Based on user navigation difficulties, we updated the site’s Information Architecture. The solution was to eliminate the landing pages and replace them with clear navigation bar headers featuring dropdown menus. This new structure made it easier for users to scan and access specific information quickly, resembling a table of contents.
Images Coming Soon!
Dedicated Media Pages:
To solve the issue of users struggling to find specific types of content, we reorganized the media section. Each media type now has its own page with filters, allowing users to search by issue, date, or location. This made GJEP’s rich media content more accessible and highlighted their expertise in these areas.
Focus on GJEP’s Impact:
The homepage was redesigned to prioritize GJEP’s impact statement in the hero image. A timeline of key accomplishments was added, and a section highlighting the organization’s current projects, making it clear what GJEP stands for and what they are working towards.
Next Steps: Usability Testing
The high-fidelity prototype was handed off to the UX Research team for further usability testing. The goal is to validate whether the revisions—particularly the new navigation structure, media page organization, and improved mission clarity—resolved the issues identified in previous rounds of testing.
The usability testing will take place during the next phase of the project.
Impact: Increasing Trust and Clarity
The redesign of the GJEP website aimed to tackle major user concerns around mission clarity, credibility, and donation transparency. Through user-centered design and iterative testing, we developed solutions that improved the overall user experience, enhanced trust in the organization, and aligned with GJEP’s goals to increase donations and engagement.
Stats Coming Soon!
By clarifying GJEP’s mission, modernizing the design, and simplifying navigation, we created a more trustworthy and accessible website that allows users to connect more meaningfully with the organization’s cause.
Kristin Lucas – Updated 2024