Background
Refuge is a UK-based charity offering a range of services which provides women and children with access to professional support. They run a domestic Violence helpline, offer advice and counselling, and even provide safe houses for victims of domestic violence and abuse.
Brief
The charity had a legacy website with a huge amount of content: articles, white-papers, campaigns, progress reports on lobbying, etc. Their old site had grown organically over a number of years and was badly in need of an overhaul in terms of look & feel, structure and information architecture.
Further to this, the current economic climate had forced the charity to shift priorities away from requesting volunteers, towards requests for donations and fund raising. Their new website needed to mirror this shift in priorities.
Implementation
A competitor analysis piece was undertaken first, in order to evaluate other effective charity websites and identify how they related their charity’s values and goals, and how they handled donation requests. Learnings from this were fed into the eventual solution.
I then carried out a full content audit of their legacy site in order to understand the nature, quantity and value of their current content, and then redefined the site’s structure around this, reflecting the shift towards calls for donations.
User journeys where constructed for different use-cases, reflecting the role the charity plays in offering information and support to victims of domestic violence, it’s work lobbying government, and it’s requests for donations, volunteers and other forms of support.
A new site map was created to draw all this definition work together, and a set of interactive wireframes where created to demonstrate page structures, information architecture, and navigation principles.
The homepage wireframe was also used to demonstrate how prominent calls to action and contextual messaging would work hand-in-hand with the site’s look & feel to communicate both the “we are there for you” aspect of the charity, and their need for donations and support.
Assets & Resources
