Oppia Donation Page Redesign

Keywords: Competitor Analysis, Usability Tests, Feature Prioritization, Design Thinking

Context

Oppia is a non-profit in the area of online education. The organization is growing with over 100 volunteers and there is an increasing need for a steady donation stream to cover the operational and technology cost of the on-going projects and for recruiting full-time employees in the future. 

Team

Our team consists of one product manager, one UX researcher (me), one UX designer. The team works closely with the management team at Oppia on deadlines and project requirements.

Problem

Since its debut, Oppia has been largely focused developing classes and working with developers to ensure the quality of online lessons currently on the platform, little is being done or researched on who our donor is and how to improve the existing site.

Project Kickoff

The kick-off process started with meetings with the management team at Oppia to learn and find out more about the challenges, problems, and existing donation process at Oppia. We learned Oppia has only received very small amount of donation in the past and none of the donation is recurrent.

Competitor Analysis

Since there is not enough existing data on donors, we decided to look at what other existing educational non-profit have done for their donation process. We conducted a competitor analysis of 3 other educational non-profits, i.e. Code.org, Room to Read, Khan Academy. All of the 3 orgs received over $60,000 annually and we examined the main features that are common across the 3 organizations.

The common elements that we found are these orgs that have successfully collected donations have Call For Action messages that shows impact of donation, has a smooth and easy to follow donation process, easiness in terms of navigation to the donation page, also has transparent document in terms of donor profile and annual reports.

In comparison, Oppia’s CFA message is weak and is in need of an emphasis on the impact of donation. The navigation process is less spot-on since the donation page is nested under other categories on the home page. The current donation process is down to the minimal with 3 buttons for users to choose from whereas all the other website offers more options for users to choose from and often follows a logical step by step payment structure from choosing frequency of donation to selecting or customizing the donation amount. 

Prototypes and Within-Subject Usability Test

Based on the insights from competitor analysis and secondary research about how and why people would donate to non-profits, our designer came up with two prototypes, V1.1 and V1.2, with slight difference on the payment flow. 

Since the director was concerned about the existing resources from the developer team, to provide data-driven design recommendations, I decided to do a within-subject usability test with 8 participants where the order of the 3 versions would be randomized so that which version is shown first’s effect can be controlled. 

I recruited specifically people in our donor target group, i.e. people who have supported non-profits in the past. The lack of budget added another layer of difficulty for finding participants and in the end, I recruited 4 participants who met our donor profile and who agreed to volunteer to do the test with me.

findings

3 Key take-aways from our usability sessions are:

• Users seek a wealth of info about Oppia before making a decision to donate (e.g. students, teachers, volunteers, the platform, the organization itself)

• Users prefer straightforward payment process

• Users concern about trust and credibility

The main finding that we got from the test session is that:

Users’ decision to donate is less based on the Call to Action message or the UI of the donation page but more on the overall presentation of info about Oppia as a whole.

To encourage the team to think outside of the box before jumping right into design solutions, I used the “How Might We” framework, in so doing, I changed the problem statement into three HMW questions:

• how might we make it easier for users to find the info that they need?

• how might we make make the donation process even more streamlined while keeping it still logical?

• how might we build trust with users and make the website more credible?

Based on these questions, we came up with solutions that not only touches upon the donation page but the whole donation process. 

Feature prioritization