Changemakers Case Study

Shifting user needs and an older, outdated information architecture and design demanded a revolutionary redesign of the Changemakers site. The Changemakers management team tapped Adaptive Path to develop the new site's strategy, information architecture, interaction design, and visual design and Enomaly to build the new site.

Home Page for the New Site

About Changemakers

Changemakers is a program of Ashoka, a global non-profit organization supporting the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Changemakers hosts competitions to find the best solutions to social problems, and allows the community to collaborate on, refine, enrich, and implement those solutions. All competition entries are open to public comment and are voted upon to determine which ideas go before a panel of judges. The judges then decide which finalist has the most actionable idea. The winner is awarded a cash prize and the chance to work with the competition sponsor to realize their idea.

The Challenge

Changemakers first launched the site as a platform for its global competitions. Over time, the site's infrastructure could not scale as the traffic for competitions grew. The organization had difficulty adapting the site's features, functionality, and architecture to meet the requirements set by sponsors and the needs of the community. As the community on the site grew, users began to expect more from Changemakers than simply hosting competitions. New social entrepreneurs wanted to use the site to get their messages out into the world and grow by learning from each other.

Shifting user needs and an older, outdated information architecture and design demanded a revolutionary redesign of the Changemakers site. The Changemakers management team tapped Adaptive Path to develop the new site's strategy, information architecture, interaction design, and visual design and Enomaly to build the new site.

Working collaboratively with the Changemakers team, Adaptive Path identified three core needs for the success of the Changemakers online mission and website: a better understanding of their key audiences and how they are engaging with site's competition and the community aspects, an updated information architecture and interaction design model, and a refreshed visual design.

Clarifying the Problem

During the initial discovery phase of the project, 90% of the Changemakers staff joined the kick-off meeting, either in person or remotely. The entire organization was excited about the possibilities for the next iteration of the site and its potential to support the social entrepreneur community.

Before diving into user research, the team focused on generating and prioritizing the research questions for Changemakers' key audiences: the sponsor, the competition entrant, and the everyday changemaker. The team detailed questions that would tie back to Changemakers' key performance metrics. Once the team knew the focus of their research and had an understanding of the key business needs, they created a research plan designed to help understand Changemakers' global audience.

The research plan included speaking with competition sponsors, the international Changemakers team, and members of the international Changemakers' community in seven countries—United States, Canada, Macedonia, Australia, India, Uganda, and The Netherlands. Community members varied from people involved in social entrepreneurship to young non-profit organizations and experienced non-profits with existing projects. Sponsors were represented at all levels, from other non-profits such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to Nike.

During the research, the team uncovered key unmet needs of the Changemakers community. One compelling story came from a man who runs a youth organization in Uganda that is embroiled in a battle against AIDS and lack of access to education. He has limited access to a computer, but when he is able to get online, he spends three to four hours on the Changemakers site to see what other social entrepreneurs in his region are doing to be successful. A key takeaway from this and similar conversations was the power of place, defined by the team as both geographic and area of expertise. This insight into what people searched for on the site led to the addition of "places" and "issues" hub pages to the information architecture.

The team also spoke to a competition entrant in Australia who had recently founded a non-profit. He had gone beyond the Changemakers site to win the competition, creating a link to Google Analytics from his competition page to keep track of his votes and the conversation. His efforts paid off and he won the competition, but afterward he felt that the Changemakers site did not offer him the support or structure he had anticipated. The Changemakers and Adaptive Path team determined the site needed tools for competition entrants to help them connect with the community. As a result, Adaptive Path designed a "groups" section of the site, which allows users to create discussion forums for specific topics that might not be covered by a competition.

Through the research, the Changemakers team developed a strong empathy for their users' challenges, goals, and needs, as well as tangible design directives that would influence the next phase of the site’s redesign. The findings from the research went beyond the website to profound organizational change to better support their users.

Competition Page for the New Site

From Research to Design

Adaptive Path crafted a high-level analysis of the research findings including user stories and an engagement model, highlighting the user journey from community member to competition entrant to competition winner. The model identified barriers and activities users engaged in at each stage. The team also generated a checklist of six design principles that defined the necessary qualities of the new Changemakers experience that the internal Changemakers team can use to make future design decisions.

The team began the design of the web site with the structure or information architecture. Starting with the global navigation, Adaptive Path defined three tiers to the site that interacted with each other on a consistent level. The team then took the global navigation to Changemakers' offices in Washington DC and, in collaborative working sessions with the Changemakers team, defined the user flow through a technique called storyboarding. For each storyboard, the Adaptive Path team prepared a use case for the Changemakers team and worked with them to sketch out potential solutions. Giving non-designers a role in the design process was critical to ensuring that the rest of the Changemakers organization had their voices heard and their ideas sketched out and documented. The Adaptive Path team then translated the design direction from the working sessions into the final information architecture and initial page designs.

Once Changemakers approved the information architecture, the team then compiled the site's features and functionality. They broke their list into functional areas and started a series of weekly design sprints to complete the site's interaction design. The design sprints followed a regular pattern: At the beginning of the week, a meeting would outline the focus of the sprint, followed immediately by concept development starting with thumbnail sketches, becoming more detailed over time. The team generated dozens of thumbnails per sprint, winnowing the concepts down to four to five alternative approaches for each page. Design sprints were particularly effective for remote collaboration by constraining the team with a rhythmic and regular schedule. Over the course of the project, the combined Changemakers and Adaptive Path team went through five rounds of sprints and hundreds of design iterations.

The design revisions focused on flow and simplicity. The team wanted to enable users to move through the site comfortably by designing fun and fluid interactions that get the audience to the content they need quickly. Some of the design sprints focused on internal interfaces as well. One design sprint focused on the competition entry evaluation process that Changemakers uses to evaluate individual entries. Through several rounds of iteration, the time to evaluate competition evaluations was reduced from 40 hours a month to eight hours a month.

In parallel with the interaction design process, Adaptive Path created the new visual design of the site. The team went through two rounds of brand exploration, which they later expanded into a new visual direction for the site. Once the client approved the interaction design, the team developed a final, detailed visual design based on the final wireframes.

Home Page for the New Site

Development & Launch

Naturally, the Changemakers team was eager to quickly launch the new site for the Changemakers community. Through weekly updates on the design process, Adaptive Path and the site's development firm Enomaly developed a plan to jump-start the site's implementation. The site could be developed quickly because the Enomaly team was present at every design review, ensuring that design and development took each other’s needs and strengths into account.

The power of the new Changemakers site does not stem from a clear global navigation or innovative user flow. It is the result of the Changemakers team's commitment to delivering a valuable and joyful experience to their vital and vibrant community. This project also is a reminder that a compelling user experience does not only affect screens and technology, but also people, their organizations, and their community.