Porpoise Conservation Society - Design Sprint

Prototype: Providing users with knowledge and information regarding the extinction and support needed for Porpoises and enhancing the donation experience for users to have incentive to support the organization

Role: UX Designer - Including product design and UX Research

Timeline: March 2022

Collaboration: Joanne Sangmee Oh, Ameya Joshi and Benjamin Gluch

Tools: Figma & InVision

Platform: iOS

Organization Website: www.porpoise.org

Project Summary

Porpoise Conservation Society is a non-government organization and a registered charity dedicated to the conservation of all species of porpoise and their habitats.

The goal of this project’s research focuses on helping this organization express their value and inspire people to take action in order to drive positive change

Problem Space

Studies show that a large portion of the millennial population is willing to donate to non-profit organizations. Among these is Porpoise Conservation Society, an organization that aims to protect and conserve all species of porpoise and their natural habitats.

However, factors like lack of engaging content, transparency about the use of donations and poor optimization for mobile platforms create barriers for non-profit organizations, like the Porpoise Conservation Society, to extend their reach and grow support from millennials.

Secondary Research

As we decided or focus demographic would be millennials, we conducted research regarding their habits with technology and how can we use this implement this information to enhance user experiences. We concluded:

• 40% of Millennial donors are enrolled in a monthly giving program
  
  

• Millennials are most likely to contribute to work sponsored initiatives, donate via mobile and watch online videos before making a gift.
  
  

• Millennials are active on their phones and respond best to text message and social media, but rarely check personal email or respond to voice calls.

Find more information regarding Charitable Giving Statistics here

User Journey

Key Demographic: Millennials

We mapped out the user journey of navigating throughout the current website

User Interviews

We conducted user interviews regarding our focus demographic to have a better understanding of their thoughts and opinions about the organization’s current website and how they navigate with the organization’s donation system.

“Unfortunately, there are charities which have commercialized and have diverted from their main objective or cause. That would not be something I would want to support.” - Interviewee 1

“Feels like they never see the actual positive change done by these organizations. It’s never-ending fundraising.” - Interviewee 2

“The website mostly educates about different species of porpoise but it’s hard to find information on why they need to be conserved and what the actual problem is.” - Interviewee 3

After conducting our user interviews, our team organized common themes and insights amongst the interviewees and concluded on 3 major themes:

1. Inspiration & Engagement - There was lack of inspiration and engagement on the website. The website does not capture the attention of the user and just shows informative text. The user forced to browse through the website to find different ways to contribute towards the organization and even then, there is nothing on the landing page to show any urgency towards the user to feel engaged or pressure to help.

2. Transparency of the use of donations - The next theme we found was the transparency use of donations. Like many charities and non-profit organizations, it is very unclear what the donations and monterey contribution is used for. There is no follow-up for users to stay connected with their contribution which causes mistrust for supporters who genuinely want to help.

3. Resource & Information - The current website shows too much text heavy information and not enough visuals which intimidates the users to read all information and would easily close the page or move onto the next page that catches their attention

Opportunity - How Can We Help?

From browsing the website, we found difficulty engaging and partaking with the organization. We saw an opportunity with the adoption page and wanted to enhance the user experience by building emotional connections between the user and the adoption incentive. 

The adoption page on the website was text heavy and intimidated users with the lack of basic information to progress with the adoption. 

Rather than just receiving a certificate, we decided to build a mobile application that help educate users and feel connected with their adoption by providing a fun collectible feature to share with friends and family.

We formulated a How Might We to alleviate our problem space:

How might we improve the current porpoise adoption experience to be more engaging for millennials in order to inspire them to donate through a mobile app?

User Persona

We created a user persona based off interview insights which will help build our solution to our problem space with the organization and the user experience.

Task Flow Analysis

We concluded our direction of our task flow would be to better inform and engage users with the organization’s content and to focus on enhancing the donation experience in order to create incentive for our users to feel their donations have impacted and drive positive changes towards porpoises

Design Decisions

We found our UI inspiration with content that has eye-catching visuals and simple functional features that can be implemented through our wireframe and prototypes.

We saw the old website was overwhelming, dark and plain. We wanted to implement colours that make users feel excited, inspired and curious towards the organization 

We also wanted to add a font style that is clean and easy on the eyes - texts that won’t clutter with each other and intimidate the user. 

Rough Sketches

After reviewing and deciding ideas based off our UI Inspirations, we drafted and sketched some potential designs for our wireframe - piecing everything together and slowly producing a solution for our users

User Testing & Prototype

We conducted user tests amongst our target demographic in order to gain insight and feedback for our initial prototype. This helps us determine and prioritize usability changes for our prototype in order to design the best user experience for our digital solution.

User Test Finding Results - Feedback & Revision

During the usability test, all participating users expressed confusion with the feature of locked icons in our initial prototype. 

With their feedback, we decided to provide context behind visual icons to showcase the purpose of the feature which was a badge system, to collect badges by adopting a virtual porpoise.

With the payment page,  users felt that it was misleading as we initially wanted to show the base donation is $25 to adopt a porpoise, but can also add additional funds if wanted. 

To fix this issue, we decided to input a fixed amount to show users that $25 is all they needed to adopt a virtual porpoise and that donations are separated on another tab to allows users to customize any amount incase they wanted to contribute more or less than the adoption fee.

Finally,  with the confirmation page, users indicated that the screen looked plain and did not feel an impact with where their money will used for. 

We revised this by adding and highlighting context to help users understand where their donation will go towards and show transparency of donation use.

Key Learning & Next Steps

Collaborating and working with fellow UX Designers throughout this project has definitely challenged our UX fundamentals, teamwork and communication overall.

Some key learning experiences from this project that I took away were:

1. Gathering all information collected within the day and to organize it through the slide deck early to prevent disorganization

2. When designing wireframes and prototyping, small and simple tasks are easily missed

Future Implementations

As a team, we concluded prioritizing specific steps to implement for our project to create a better user experience as well as to help the organization gain more exposure with the importance of their cause. These next steps include:

1. Target more age demographics to increase user engagement and awareness

2. Multiple rounds of prototyping and wireframes for additional features along with user testing

3. Continue improving the website for a better user experience