Hope Community
Website evaluation
Project Overview
Hope Community is a nonprofit in Minneapolis focused on equity and community development. Their goal with this project was to learn how they could better leverage their website to communicate their impact to the community, donors, and volunteers.
Planning Phase
Usability Review
The first step for my research team was to familiarize ourselves with the Hope Community website. This helped us to further identify the goals of the website and its users.
After discussions and brainstorming, we drafted 6 key tasks to be evaluated for functionality. Each member of the research team then conducted an independent usability review of the website. This allowed us to identify pain points and areas of opportunity before conducting usability testing.
Hope Community Usability Review
Usability Testing
Next, eleven participants were tested independently through moderated, 30-minute, remote zoom calls. Users were directed to complete a series of tasks using think-aloud protocol.
Affinity diagram
Synthesizing the research
Affinity diagramming was used to group user insights based on commonalities. This led to identifying overarching themes that helped with uncovering where the greatest needs were for improvement.
Key Findings and Recommendations
Language in the navigation menu should be made to be more clear and descriptive so that users can quickly locate information about Hope Community programs.
Features should be added that allow users to sign up for volunteer opportunities and enroll in programs directly from the website, and link audits should be performed regularly to ensure that links to external sites are functioning properly.
A clear and concise mission statement with accomplishments listed should be placed in a position of prominence so that users have a clear understanding of what Hope Community is.
Conclusion
Reflection
Focusing on the usability of a website gave me the opportunity really focus on the research and how to help the organization move forward in the best possible way. It is my hope that the recommendations provided to Hope Community, if put into effect, help them attract more members of the community as well as potential volunteers and donors by allowing them to be informed and take action through the website.