She’s the First Site Redesign


volunteer project through the Claremont Graduate University Games and Interactive Technology Lab
Jun 2024 - Aug 2024
role: UX researcher in a team of 3.

Background:

She’s the First, an NGO that supports woman-led grassroots organizations working for women’s rights, was looking to redesign their site in 2025, and wanted recommendations for a better user experience.

She’s the First described 3 primary users - donors, practitioners who work at grassroots organizations, and girls looking for resources. We wanted to make sure that each of these users could find what they needed on their website.

Additionally, She’s the First wanted recommendations to ensure that their website authentically reflects the voices of the girls they work with.





1. Heuristic Evaluation

Each member of the team completed a heuristic evaluation on the main pages of the website using these criteria from the Nielsen Norman group. We then compiled our evaluations and scores and focused on criteria with the lowest scores:
  •     Visibility of System Status
  •     Consistency and Standards
  •     Aesthetic and Minimalist Design





2. Comparative Analysis

To gain a better perspective on NGO websites, we each evaluated 2 other NGO websites, for a total of 6 to study their conventions and design solutions.

Our observations led us to focus on these general recommendations:

Content:

Give higher visibility to the existing first-person accounts from girls on their blog and social media.

Design:

Focus on minimizing text having clear information architecture to guide the eye through the page.

Navigation:

Breadcrumb trails with links to subpages and descriptions for subpages make finding information easier.






3. Provisional Persona Creation

We then each created a persona for one of the 3 user types above to better understand who we’re designing for. While we didn’t have access to existing users of the site, I used featured stories on the site and on social media to gain a better understanding of the girls using this site.



4. Detailed Site Analysis

Each member of the team focused on 3 of the most-visited pages based on site analytics to provide section-by-section, low-level edits such as changing specific language and link formatting.  

This slideshow contains some of my proposals for the Who We Are, What We Do and Our Impact pages.
Reordering existing information for better narrative flow
Creating an informational hierarchy for clearer navigation
Changing link formatting for clarity 
Adding more information and visual interest to pages
Reorganizing site elements for ease of use
Reorganizing site elements for ease of use
Reorganizing site elements for ease of use

5. Navigation Menu Redesigns

One of the major issues we noticed was in the organization of sub-pages on the site, where it was unintuitive and unclear on which page the information we were seeking was.
To improve the navigation experience, we redesigned the navigation sidebar and footer on the website. Here’s my redesign of the sidebar:




We added to and reorganized the links based on types of user:

  1. The first 3 options focus on the organization, and the next 3 are targeted to girls, organizations, and volunteers, respectively.

  2. The last 4 options are targeted to donors to stay updated as well as contribute monetarily.

  3. We added the Blog to the sidebar to make sure girls’ voices are prominent on the site, and we added the Shop link to promote a secondary form of monetary engagement.


Current Design
Proposed Design


6. Reflection

Our final deliverable was a slide deck containing all our conclusions from the heuristic evaluation, comparative analysis, personas and journey maps and a detailed walkthrough of all our proposed edits, which we submitted to the Head of Communications and Advocacy at She’s the First as a reference for the site redesign.

Given the nature of this project, we were unfortunately not able to directly interview existing users of the She’s the First website to get their feedback on the website, which was a little frustrating. While we were able to gather data from conducting Think-Out-Loud experiments with users in the target demographic, a lot of our work was assumptions-based and relied more on our implementation of UX principles than user data. While I am happy with our deliverables, it would be nice to test some of our proposed edits with users to verify that they have the desired effect.

Conducting a site audit of this scale was also challenging due to the size of the project - we had to decide for ourselves how many pages and which pages to focus on as well as how granular our feedback should be, and then try to deliver it in a slide deck that explained our rationale for each decision to a layperson but still be concise.