The Challenge
The Best Buddies International website was outdated and due for a major overhaul. The Best Buddies team described their site at the time as being dark and uninviting, too text-heavy, having poor navigational structure with repetitive content and overly long forms. Best Buddies also is active in 50 states and many of their regional sites had varied designs from the international site and lacked brand consistency.
The goals of the new site were
- To create an emotional mission connection for the site users
- Increase engagement via donation, eCommerce and event participation
- Present a unified branding approach for the international and regional websites.
The Solution
I worked closely with the Best Buddies internal marketing and design teams to identify the needs of the both the International and Regional sites. From a detailed site map I evaluated user flows, navigation labels and content organization and made improvements to clarify and streamline the user interface. This informed the wireframes and designs that I presented to the team.
I designed an interactive map to help users find their local programs. From the map users could navigate to local state sites that each used a new complementary layout to the international site thus creating brand continuity. In addition to other custom pages, I implemented a dynamic timeline of the history of the organization.