MOVING FORWARD
FAMILY SERVICES
(MFFS)
#UX design
#Responsive web
#Low-fee family counselling
#Direct donation
OVERVIEW
Moving Forward Family Services (MFFS) is a local charity organization that provides low-barrier counselling services throughout lower mainland. MFFS believes no one should be turned away from getting counselling services and they aim to provide helps immediately without a waiting list.
In this project, our client was seeking a redesign to their existing website so that it can help them attract more donations, acquire potential patients, connect with future interns and get referrals from other agencies.
FACT SHEET
Timeline: 3 weeks
My Role: Lead UX Designer
Team: Richard Jiang, Corina Sirbulescu, Cody Rossi, Mara Gomez
My UX Methods: User Research, Competitive/ Comparative Analysis, Affinity Diagram, User Persona, Information Architecture, User Journey Map, User Flow, Prototyping, Usability Testing
Tools: Adobe Illustrator, Sketch, InVision
PROJECT ATTRIBUTES
– Information Architecture
– MVP
– Direct Donation
– Responsive Web Design
THE
CHALLENGE
Comparing with competitors’ websites, the information structure of our client’s current website was not optimized. Long paragraphs of contents cluttered the homepage, and key information like contacts and address were so hard to find, thus causing a not-so-desirable user experience for nowadays clients.
THE
HURDLES
1. Confidential Target Audience
Potential patients and donors were 2 important target audience groups of the website. However, due to the nature of our client and the existing best practices in the counselling industry, we were unable to contact their patients directly as it could break the doctor-patient confidentiality clause. The client would also prefer to keep their donors confidential. In this way, we were unable to establish any direct connections with these 2 target audience groups.
Our alternative solution was to design an anonymous survey targeted at people around us to simulate potential counselling patients and general donors. This was supported by a Statistics Canada study that one in every 6 Canadians needs counselling services.
We also came up with a secondary survey for the interns at MFFS as we believed that their inputs could be a good second-hand contextual inquiry of our target audiences. Last but not least, we had a long telephone interview with Mr. Gary Thandi, founder of MFFS, for more insights into their organization.
2. Multiple User Personas
Our client came up with 4 target audience groups during the kick-off meeting: patients, donors, interns and referring agencies. These massive target audience groups could result in multiple user personas which may not be feasible given the 3-week time span for this project.
During the telephone interview with Mr. Gary Thandi, he mentioned that the interns actually contact them via school recommendations. Right now, MFFS has already employed over 50 interns, so they were not in urgent need to seek more. He also told us that other agencies refer patients to them based on existing relations, as they already knew and trusted MFFS.
At this stage, it was very clear that interns and referring agencies may not necessarily browse MFFS website before they make a decision. So for this project, we would just need to focus on potential patients and donors.
THE
PROBLEM
During our user research, we discovered that our users’ main pain points are:
For potential patients:
1. Finding the right service information is hard;
2. People perceive counselling services expensive if without insurance coverage.
For potential donors:
1. Lack of transparency in the business operations of charities;
2. Lack of general information about charities.
THE
SOLUTIONS
1. To make it easier for our users to find the right service, a new services index page that categorized every single service MFFS provides was designed and optimized by our information architecture building process. We also integrated a detailed step-by-step instruction on how to get counselling from MFFS.
2. To address our users’ concerns regarding high counselling fees, we listed actual fees and insurance coverage information on the services index page as well as every single service explanation page to inform users directly that MFFS’s services are low-barrier.
3. We added a donate page to address how MFFS will use your money, as well as several non-monetary donations you can provide in order to increase transparency and involvement between potential donors and MFFS.
4. We put MFFS’s initiatives, missions and impacts right on the homepage and redesigned the about page to include the values, the team and awards in order to provide comprehensive information for our target audience.
SUMMARY
In summary, our website redesign caters to the needs of potential donors to gain more insights and donate directly while browsing. As well it helps potential patients to find services they need and get access to counselling with less effort.
