Designed to raise funds for ToKidz, a Not-for-Profit bringing eLearning to Africa's Children
Project Background
Always chat with your Uber drivers, you never know what their story is, or what they do when they aren’t driving. Paulus, a Director at Velvet Onion at the time, was catching an Uber between clients, chatting away with his Uber driver Luckson. Turns out Luckson also ran a Not for Profit with the goal of delivering eLearning to all the children of Africa, using solar charged tablets and existing eLearning software. Reaching those even in remote locations. Further discussion revealed that Luckson was in need of raising $150 000 AUD in order to get over to Africa and begin the first round of implementation.
We invited Luckson to the office to have a kickoff meeting. Our goal during this meeting was to understand the business and its problems in order to see where we can provide maximum value, discovering the users and their journeys.
The Problems
How do I get to my funding goal of 150K?
How do I get schools to come on board?
How do I manage the expansion to other countries, whilst keeping the ToKidz vision, goals and values intact?
The existing website was an underpinning factor in the problems present. For the Minimum viable product our focus was on potential donors as the primary persona for the website and schools as the secondary persona.
Process and my involvement
Content Audit - I went through every page of the existing site to both map and understand every piece of existing content we had to work with. Through this process I was able to grasp at the story of ToKidz.
Content sort - Each piece of content gathered from the Audit was printed and cut out. This enabled Tim (on the Velvet Onion Team) and myself to sort through the content, understand what ToKidz is and developing the ToKidz story into something clear, emotive and understandable.
Information Architecture - I developed the content sort into an Information architecture that communicated the flow of information and story of ToKidz
Wireframes - We knew we were going to build the site in Squarespace, however we decided to design some wireframes first, in order to ease implementation and focus feedback on the page flow itself, not on visual design. I developed wireframes in Sketch and went through several rounds of feedback with the team and Luckson before we began the website build.
Squarespace Build - I began by selecting a template which best resembled the wireframes and created blanks for all the necessary pages. Next was setting up the layout of each page and dropping the content into place and ensuring buttons and other forms of navigation linked to where they were supposed to.
Visual design - Once content and layout were implemented, I began the visual design. Luckson portrayed a very positive and emotive personality and I wanted this to be conveyed through the site. So sans-serif fonts were used to complement the clean layout and modern approach to education for disadvantaged children. The dark red brown treatment across all header images was used to convey the ToKidz brand association with Africa. Images were chosen from stock websites that were positive and uplifting in nature, in many cases using imagery of childrens faces which are easier to emotionally connect with.
Handover - The website was approved and handed over to Luckson to control in October 2016. He has since been in talks with potential investors.