Role
Sole Product Designer
Impact
Increased donation 2x
Increased volunteer base 2x
Fields
UX Design
UI Design
Copy writing
The Problem
"How can I donate?"
Curry without Worry (CWOW) is a San Francisco based soup kitchen cooking vegetarian, Nepalese food for the homeless. To support the business and community base, the CWOW website needed a major facelift . With a non-intuitive website, the organization struggled to expand their current volunteer base, donation amount, and communicate their value to potential sponsors.
Design Goals
Sustainable Expansion
The CWOW admin had ambitous goals of expansion. However, the admin were not technologically savvy and lacked marketing / messaging know how. To build sustainable change, I used the intutive drag and drop CMS, Flipcause. Enusring that future changes could easily be made by other admin.
I identified the following as goals to achieve:
- Conduct a usability study of the current interface
- Facilitate an intuitive volunteer sign up and donation experience
- Clarify on the communicated mission statement
- Create visibility for ingredient list
Reflections
Non-profits are similar to B2C startups
The Bay Area has a number of NGO's and non-profit's vying for corporate sponsorship, volunteers, and overall donations. To make a compelling case of CWoW"s mission, qualitative and quantitative metrics had to be shown as much as possible. This boiled down to capturing the number of people helped and sentiments from volunteers.
Food and community were at the heart of CWoW's success, compelling imagery would be needed to show the impact CWoW made and make an emotional connection to potential donors and volunteers.
Discovery Phase
Identifying the volunteers
By identifying the visitors the CWOW website, I grouped volunteers into distinct categories.
- The elderly and retired with time to spare.
- Corporate volunteers looking for a team outing and a charity to support
- Highschool and college students looking to volunteer
- Media and government agencies seeking to support local non-profits
Early Iterations
Wireframes
Digging Deeper
Finding a compelling mission
Non-profits are consistently known to have a transient volunteer base. This leads to two consequences - a lack of fixed labor and donation base.
CWOW, however, ran counter to this phenomenon. I interviewed recurring volunteers why they had come back to CWOW and discovered the following:
- Shrawan, the founder, told his inspiring story. As a Nepalese orphan creating his own SF restaurant and shifting his career to improve the welfare of SF homeless.
- Volunteering was a fun and fulfulling experience. Volunteers had a sense of ownership of the bread and curry they cooked and served. For many who have never cooked Nepalese food before, this was also an educational experience.
- A strong sense of community and inclusion from an eclectic array of volunteers offered a sense of belonging.
I communicated these themes in the following pictures.
Final Version
Recreating a warm and legible welcome
Before (left) and after (right)
Feedback
The new redesign provided a significant amount of clarity around the donation and sign - up process. Inbound emails increased by 2x.
Shrawan and his team have since been requested for several corporate support trips and media outings.