Challenge

UJA has a strong, well-known brand and committed donor base, but their website lacked a design structure and several e-commerce best practices that would unlock the revenue potential of the site.

Solution

FWD re-imagined the design of the site from the ground up and placed a particular emphasis on redesigning the site’s donation pages to be more digestible, leading to an increase in organic traffic across the website and a substantial increase in conversion rate on all of the site’s donation forms.

Strategy

Fortunately, UJA has always had strong conversion rates and organic traffic thanks to their long-standing relationships with the communities they serve. This meant we didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. Instead, our goal was to build upon what existed — modernizing and simplifying the user experience wherever possible to make it even easier for donors to give. We also were particularly focused on improving the overall structure of the website and reorganized the entire navigation with the goal of improving SEO and helping each supporter find the best ways to engage with the organization.

Improving user experience

After a discovery process with UJA’s development, creative, and digital teams, we got to work building out new page wireframes. We improved the UX by introducing a mega menu to make it easier for users to navigate through a very robust and content heavy site. The donation pages were also upgraded from long, vertical scrolling page to a direct, multi-step design that guided users through the checkout process with the goal of increasing conversion. We also introduced new tabbed modules, scrolling lists, and carousels that better utilized the space and were more engaging than the elements that were most often used on the previous site..

Digital design system

Working within UJA’s existing brand guidelines, we created a design system for the website that was cleaner, more intuitive, and modern. We started by establishing rules for spacing, colors, and font styling across the site, effectively building a design hierarchy for each unique page type on the site. We also developed detailed guidelines to help UJA’s web team maintain consistency as they worked with new elements post-launch. Across all page types we brought in more of UJA’s branded graphics and icons to create more visually compelling pages and reduce the organization’s reliance on photography—a perennial pain point we heard about throughout our discovery process. Collectively, all of these UX and UI changes added up and led to a jump in conversion rates that exceeded even our most optimistic forecasts.

Development

Our best results come from projects where our team acts as a true extension of the client’s team. This type of project was no exception. We took on a very collaborative process with UJA’s internal development team that divided efforts across a complex project that involved updates to the site’s frontend, backend, API, and payment gateways. Taking this approach this allowed us to take advantage of UJA’s extensive historical knowledge about their own codebase while ensuring our developers could look at things with fresh eyes and make suggestions about potential optimizations. Collectively, our teams accomplished a lot in 4 months—keeping the project on time and under budget while delivering an aesthetically pleasing and modern website that was a significant step forward from what came before it.