An Easier Mile (AEM) is a recently established nonprofit dedicated to providing financial and well-being assistance for immigrant and minority working-class families. I was connected to AEM through Develop for Good, an organization that pairs teams of student engineers, designers, and PMs to nonprofits to assist them with building digital solutions like websites or apps.

AEM’s mission is to help families embark on new paths—one mile at a time—by offering support such as weekly meals to encourage family time or career counseling and language lessons to open doors to new opportunities. In addition to financial and wellness programs for target families, AEM provides volunteer opportunities and accepts donations from contributors who support their mission.

Before collaborating with Develop for Good, AEM relied solely on word of mouth and proactive cold calls to reach families. Our project was to design and build a fully functional, responsive Wix website to establish AEM’s online visibility and credibility. The website would streamline their operations by shifting from manual processes to automating application and information collection for families, volunteers, and donors. This led us to ask the question: How might we provide an easy way for interested families and volunteers to learn about AEM and engage with their services?

To better meet the client’s vision for their new site, we analyzed three existing websites that the client wished to model after:

• AirBnb - sleek design and ease of use, few buttons with clear menu pages to navigate to
• Gates Foundation - impactful storytelling nature, graphics-heavy with brief text
• Make a Wish Foundation - multiple languages feature, nominations feature

We analyzed and evaluated their strengths/weaknesses in visuals, usability, and accessibility to see how to best meet the client’s requirements. To better understand effective nonprofit website structures, we also analyzed three other websites with missions similar to AEM’s to learn the logical flow for first-time users navigating the site.

AEM had two target audiences, requiring us to design the website with two user experiences in mind. The primary user group was target families — immigrant, minority, working-class parents seeking nonprofit aid. The secondary user group included contributors, such as donors and volunteers, interested in supporting AEM’s mission.

We interviewed 7 participants from family or friends of the team to learn about the real experiences and needs of our primary user demographic. Many of the questions related to how they used websites on desktop and mobile, as well as some of the main struggles they deal with in their daily lives.

To better understand the contributor user group and their experience with nonprofit involvement, we distributed a survey via LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social media platforms. With 112 respondents, we gained insights into contributor demographics, their needs from a nonprofit, and the factors that drive engagement with the organization and improve retention rates.

To help develop our design, we generated personas for each user group to illustrate their unique needs and frustrations, as well as the features they would likely engage with on AEM’s website.

#1 TARGET FAMILY

Judy is a working-class immigrant parent who works long hours to support her family. She may seek resources like educational support for herself and her family, as well as assistance with applying to government programs. She needs a platform that is extremely easy to use and prioritizes visuals over text.

#2 CONTRIBUTOR

Sarah is a young professional interested in financially supporting or volunteering for the client’s nonprofit. Typically, she conducts a lot of research on the organization beforehand, looking for those that align with her values and interests, have a strong mission statement, and demonstrate transparency, particularly in displaying funding records when seeking donations.

Details processes that target family members would most likely engage with: getting acquainted with AEM’s services and programs, and learning how to apply/nominate another family for aid.

Details processes that contributors would most likely engage with: getting acquainted with how to help AEM’s mission and learning about volunteering opportunities/donating to the AEM’s services.

I collaborated with two designers to create a design system aligned with client preferences.

• Pastel blue was chosen as the primary color for its sense of calm and trustworthiness that the clients wanted to embody. It also ensured high color contrast for accessibility.
• For typography, we prioritized accessible, mobile-friendly fonts for easy readability.
• To address the lack of visuals for an image-focused site, I sourced high-quality stock photos, primarily family images, to evoke empathy and align with the nonprofit’s mission. I also created custom illustrations in Figma and Procreate to supplement text and establish a welcoming feel.

Utilizing the design system, we established high-fidelity wireframes and created a functional prototype for users to test.

Usability testing was conducted with seven users. Watching them engage with the prototype allowed us to better understand their expectations, revealing key takeaways that would inform design changes.

This was a crucial issue that needed to be addressed, as many users were lower-literacy target families whose first language may not be English. We addressed this by minimizing content, using more visual supplements, and adding text variety to highlight key information.

Originally, clicking ‘Contact Us’ would direct users to the FAQ page since ‘Contact Us’ was a subsection of the page. This, however, proved to be unintuitive so we moved it into its own dedicated page.

Users found the volunteer and nomination forms intimidating due to their placement at the bottom of lengthy pages. To resolve this, we moved the forms to their own dedicated pages and simplified the inputs to feel less visually overwhelming.

After making relevant revisions, we produced a functional Wix website for the nonprofit founders and volunteers to manage after handoff. The website would provide a new channel for exposure to potential target families and volunteers who resonate with AEM’s mission. They will now be able to easily attract and inform interested parties, as well as automate their application processes using Wix’s form feature.

Although it was challenging at first to make the site accessible to two distinct target audiences, I realized the importance of designing solutions that accommodate diverse users. Through collaboration with clients and stakeholders, I learned to find a middle ground in the usage of language and subpage design to meet both client objectives and user needs effectively.

• Conduct further testing with more target users to evaluate accessibility and responsiveness, as well as A/B test variations for deeper design exploration and improvement insights
• Do additional research on the target audience with improved recruitment methods. I acknowledge, though, that this project took place when people were still mostly remote. Online recruitment would have also been difficult with the target group's limited technology experience.