Cause we work in the same building. Jk. The client realized most of their donations are coming from corporates, local businesses, and middle-aged individuals. With millennials becoming the second largest living adult group in the United States (2017 data), they’ve decided that they want some of the avocado money too (still kidding). Anyways, the SoW was simple at the beginning - a few tweaks on the home page and a straightforward online donation page that could blend in with their current website and help raise money in the upcoming campaign season.
• Raise $ 8,251,841 within 2 months
• Raise attention on social media and get people involved and engaged in the digital presents.
“What is the first thing to do when the client come to you with a working site? What? Hardcore judging the style? Fine, but make it quick… "
Actually I was talking about web analytics. Luckily our client has Google Analytics set up with their site so the first thing I did was to look through it. With no surprise, I found their homepage entrance paths was all over the place. People going to all kinds of pages and only a few paid attention to the little “Donate” button in the menu. This is not wrong - during normal time, their website does not carry much of a fund raising vibe but clearly with the campaign season coming up, we need more focus.
The client’s current site is a success in communicating who they are and what they do. However, there is limited designated flow in the site structure and the call-to-action “Donate” has not been properly built up.
Having a designated (user) flow is like having a real-estate agent - showing the buyers around is one, but more importantly, making the buyers lingering at where you want them to stay is the main goal. And just like in selling houses, most buyers don’t just buy the house because you tell them to - so why would we expect the website users donate their hard earn money simply because a donate button happened to be there?
Time to bring in the whole gang. Our dedicated team for this project included a marketing associate/content director, a web developer, a social media specialist, and me - the UX/UI lead. The project was meant to be a light-weight landing page. As much as we want to change and help, there is limited budget especially in development. We have to be smart about where we put the effort. A normal landing page is nice but we need our final product to work on a much larger case of scenarios. Nothing is more annoying than a mystery page only displays under certain circumstances. The following solution is one that makes everybody happy.
After the sitemap is set stone, a wireframe is under way. However, to completely understand the primary problem statement, we have more thinking to do before entering the game of boxes.
Lucky us, Dr. Robert Cialdini, Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University, has done a famous research in the 70s regarding the donation process of charities, and how a tiny difference in wording would drastically change the result. The experiment was simple. A total of 84 adults participated this research and were asked to make a donation to the American Cancer Society. A control group was set and the approaching phrases used are shown below.
The subtle change in approaching had a considerable impact on donations. People in the control group were almost twice as likely to donate.
The best part of this research? Donors were twice as likely to give in response to the second question, but the amount of money they gave did not diminish.
“ Implying that a small action is a good start will make people more amenable to making a move. "
Two things we took away from studying Dr Robert Cialdini’s research:
• Lowering the Bar of ‘Help’
The first thing we want to do is redefining the call-to-action and build the page around it. The one on the current site is “donate”. Straightforward as it is, it is too big of a decision to make right off the bat. Something is missing in the middle. How did “help us” become “donate”? No doubt that donation is our client’s primary goal and ideal source of help, but is “donate” really the best thing to ask on the website?
Our answer is no. People usually don’t ask someone they just met to ‘marry’ them, they ask ‘Do you wanna go have coffee/ tea/ tacos/ sushi/ brunch/ donuts/ ribs/ lobster (sorry went out of focus for a sec) sometime? ’ instead. Same thing here. The main call-to-action needs to be less commanding - not getting a ‘no’ is as good as getting a ‘yes’ in the middle of a user flow.
On the following chart we listed the three types of user behavior that we are expecting and the priority of them. As you can see, donate is not the only way to contribute, despite being the most important one. Giving the users other ways to help, just like saying “even a penny would help”, enhanced frequency of compliance because it legitimized the giving of paltry contributions and thereby made it difficult for a target person to decline to help. Our results have proved the theory right once again - we’ll get to that.
• Quantifying the impact
A simple “even a penny would help” was helpful - forty years ago. Come on, it’s millennials we are talking about here. Growing up with cable TVs and the Internet, they’ve seen it all. So we decided to take Dr. Robert Cialdini’s approach a step further. Not only conveying the users little money would help, but actually show them who and how this “little money” contribute the community.
Phew…we are here, finally.
Phew…we are here, finally.
It is never the other way around. At the end, out client raised $8,290,281 in a month, and received a good amount of recurring donation.
I chose this particular project to represent my skills is a risky one. I know for a UX case study this does not have enough boxes and lines. Most of time it’s me rambling on and on about a choice of a simple word - to a degree that is not even “UX design”. But this is also the reason why I love this project. I thought outside of the box. I collaborated with and learned from people who thinks differently. I took on a role that was not in my knowledge zone and managed to learn just enough to keep moving. I found in the training of becoming a UX designer I also learned how to solve a problem from an unknown field using the process of thinking. These are the core of UX design to me. It is never a solitary subject.
Despite its own language and tools, UX design is a never ending game of finding solutions, no matter what the problem is. On this exciting journey, I hope I will never become the person who thinks she has learned and known it all.
© Sinan Chen
Have a nice day ;)