The Adversity 2 Advocacy Alliance
Clients wanted to ensure that content organization and an easy-to-use CMS was at the forefront of their website redesign.
New A2A Stories website at www.a2astories.org
The Adversity 2 Advocacy Alliance is a nonprofit organization in the mental health space. They’re dedicated to promoting and fostering the power of turning personal challenges into service to others. Their work taps on the old adage that “we help ourselves by helping others”. They create digital content of inspiring stories, educational materials, as well as provide advocacy opportunities for individuals seeking to help someone or for themselves.
About the project
For this project, A2A Alliance wanted to use their upcoming fundraising campaign to re-launch their organization’s A2A Stories platform. They’ve partnered up with UC Berkeley, CBS Radio, Psychology Today and others in creating inspiring stories and research studies, but their website lacks a balance between design and content. Hoping to learn new CMS that could work better for them and design ideas that will allow their storytelling platforms to shine.
Challenge
In order to highlight the organization’s various outlets for storytelling, the website needed to have a solid framework for content organization and simple navigation system.
My Contribution
Web Design
WordPress to SquareSpace conversion
User Research
SquareSpace custom CSS & JavaScript
Team
Solo project
Timeline
February - March 2019
Process & Insights
To begin my research, I was determined to dig up answers to the #1 question I have in all my design projects—what problem is the user trying to solve? According to their WordPress analytics, a user only averages 01:22 minutes on the site and most likely only reading the About Me, Contact Us and Our Advocates pages. The content that is most important to share like their partnership with CBS Radio and Psychology Today are often overlooked.
The timeline of the project was short and getting my clients together again in one room may be a challenge so our kickoff meeting was a hybrid of stakeholder interviews, design thinking exercises, feature prioritization, and affinity mapping.
Clients doing a card sorting exercise
With such little time and resource, I asked my clients what features they’re looking for in their ideal website. I then asked them to sort this list into a Must, Should, Could, Won’t list on the wall in order to prioritize. This list was an indispensable tool I utilized to guide my process on what’s possible in little time.
Affinity Mapping reveals themes & common observations
I used the Affinity Diagram method to cluster and bundle the information and sentiments I gathered on my stakeholder interviews. This gave me an overview of the tone they want to set for the website and their goals for the user engagement.
Collaborative design exercises
In design sprint fashion, I timed my clients to draw how they envision the homepage of their new site. This gave me insight on how they visually take in information. It’s a great jump start to sketching on my own.
The Solution
Due to the time restriction, I decided on creating a microsite as a great way to initiate the CMS conversion and also serve as a landing page for the crowdfunding campaign. The A2A Stories microsite will serve as initiation to a larger CMS migration in the future. The one-pager site will link directly to the storytelling features of A2A’s website.
The clients wanted a photo of a microphone to signify the podcasts and stories highlighted on the five buttons which targets all their storytelling platforms. This allows donors for the crowdfunding campaign and new visitors to have clear CTA buttons on what we want them to see on the website.
In comparison to the A2A Alliance home website, A2A stories has easier wayfinding system that allows users to navigate between stories much easier. The aesthetics is simpler, more modern and simple which the clients were hoping to achieve.
Before
After