How can we create an online marketplace to connect both art lovers and the artists who create the artwork?
My client came to me with a vision of selling art through an online marketplace. I needed to figure out how best to keep the site aligned with her goals and vision for the site along with how to keep users involved in the process.
I worked with the Director to narrow down BE's focus to ensure the most important messages were getting across. We worked together to highlight what their users needed to know and slimmed down their copy to make it more legible for the web.
Beyond Equality (formerly known as Good Lad Initiative) came to me to help them update their website. Their old site was a bit outdated and needed some improvements to make it more modern and enjoyable to use. Put simply - I put together a website redesign.
These are the words I was told by the Director to use when moving forward with the redesign. They wanted something loud and bold, but it couldn't take away from their messaging. They also wanted it to be fun and accessible to portray the way they host their workshops. Most of all they wanted it to be awesome.
With this in mind I began looking at the men-focused organisations around the world and pulled from them to get thinking on their website.
With a redesign, the success of the site can sometimes be in limbo. But I like to work in a way that provides clarity around what success looks like for the business I'm working with.
We narrowed down 2 main objectives: increase the amount of bookings made via the website and lower the bounce rate.
**Spoiler: We did both.**
Maintaining an easy, breezy (beautiful, covergirl) feedback communication loop with my client was extremely important. They work in a non-hierarchical fashion - which I love!. This meant that I needed to speak with multiple members of the team for their feedback and how certain elements would effect the programs they are particularly working with.
This meant that sometimes feedback came at different intervals and I needed to adapt to the situation to ensure everyone was getting what they needed from this redesign.
One of the pain points they had was that potential funders could not figure out what BE was about and what they had to offer. With this redesign I intended to set out and make this process a LOT easier so they can get the money they absolutely deserved.
We modernised it and made it so much easier to read through the large amounts of information needed.
We wanted it to be modern, but playful. This was important because they never liked to get too serious, even when dealing with tough topics.
Across the website there were multiple ways to get in touch with BE. There is always a "Contact Us" button within the navigation and at the end of every page, there is a contact form. The form was also created to make it easy for BE's program managers to get the messages that directly corresponded to them.
Majority of BE's funding comes from donors. So we needed to make it easy for them to access the information they needed as well as make it easy and fun for people to learn more about the team.
Loads of their website traffic comes from Instagram - the age range is between 25 and 40, so having an up-to-date blog where users can easily find articles that are relevant to what they are interested in was key.