African Development Choices:
Website re-design
CLIENT
African Development Choices
ROLE
Lead Web Designer
CATEGORY
Web Design
SOFTWARE
Adobe XD
As Web Design Team Lead, one of my responsibilities was to redesign & update the African Development Choices (ADC) website. The objective was to create a clear, informative & easily accessible website for future volunteers, donors, & grant partners. The website needed to show transparency & focus on portraying the values of the non-profit.
Project background + description
For a social enterprise like African Development Choices (ADC), Digital Presence is key. A website is the window for the supporters, grant funders and other NGOs/NPOs to get to know the organisation, learn more about the projects and find out how to get involved.
A website is often more formal than the Social Media channels, the ADC website needed to offer more in-depth information about why they do what they do. We knew early on that if ADC was going to make its mark, the website needed to be impactful. So, in February 2020 work started on a very exciting project: re-designing ADC’s online presence.
Screenshot of the previous African Development Choices Website, prior to the re-design.
The problem
The old ADC website had been designed when the organisation had initially been set up. It was very outdated in its design & layout. The colour scheme, with the heavy use of orange, wasn’t in line with the Brand Colours & this ran the risk of causing confusion for users who were coming from ADC’s Social Medias – the website didn’t show any likeness to the Social Media Branding. Therefore this caused an issue not only of visual consistency, but also that it wasn’t clear that this was the genuine website for this organisation. The brand identity didn’t match & the information provided was nor clear nor transparent. There was both a visual communication issue, & a written communication problem. My task was to solve the visual communication problem.
Hand-drawn wireframes for the new African Development Choices Website.
Project goals + objectives
Our initial objectives for the New Website Project were quite simple:
- To modernise the design of the website
- To organise the existing content to make it easily available for all users
- To ensure that the new website aligned with our values: Transparency & Accountability, Impact & Sustainability, Empowerment & Perspective
- To enable our supporters, grant funders, future volunteers and other NGOs/NPOs to learn more about our current projects
The design process
I started by analysing our old website & planning how to present the existing content in a clearer, more transparent & accessible way, whilst modernising the design & aligning it with ADC’s Brand Guidelines. The New Website Project group met regularly to discuss the designs, and when we were happy with the first few pages, we moved onto the next stage. Vigorous feedback sessions gave insights into the changes that needed to be made. The designs were all created in Adobe XD before they were passed to the web developer to then build the website.
Our UX/UI team conducted two rounds of user research interviews via video call where the users navigated through the prototype website and gave real-time feedback on the design, usability, accessibility and content. During the User Research process, we learned that: we needed to focus on our content in order to be transparent about who we are & some users found the colour contrast too high and the page layouts too unclear.
Creative Solution
A clear, modern design was created. The pages needed to have lots of white space & show the key information in clear, visual layouts. To put the focus on ADC’s work, I decided to limit the use of photographs of the communities, unless they directly showed the projects we were working on; for example, the pilot project, the Nyansakia II Primary School #SupportWaterRights crowdfunding campaign. I kept our yellow-black-white colour palette, but added light grey for section backgrounds to soften the contrast between yellow and black.
Results
The new African Development Choices website launched with great success in 12th August 2020. It was a momentous day for African Development Choices and every volunteer involved. Through the new website, ADC was able to launch the Crowdfunding Campaign for their Pilot Project.
Making Our Mark: Launching AfricanDevelopmentChoices.org
Check out the blog I wrote about the African Development Choice’s New Website!