Strength to Strength
Redesigning the website for a nonprofit that supports victims of terror.
Role:
- Product Designer
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Visual Designer
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​Timeline:
3 months
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Deliverables:
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Website Redesign
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Logo Redesign
Company Values
Founded by a survivor herself, Strength the Strength is a nonprofit that supports survivors of terrorist attacks from all over the world. Strength to Strength's services includes 'Survivor's Circle' a support group for survivors, and events such as cooking days and weekend retreats.
My Role:
My responsibility was to research, propose, and implement design solutions. Prior to my internship, Strength to Strength had had limited design assistance and it was my job to rethink and re-optimize the website's design to achieve its goal of servicing survivors more successfully.
Goal:
Create an easy-to-navigate website
The website had one central goal: to help survivors of terrorist attacks get support. The original design made this task much more difficult than it should have been. I was brought on as an intern to simplify the site's design.
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As the project progressed I was honored to be able to learn more and more about this nonprofit and to know that I myself was helping survivors find support.
Events hosted by Strength to Strength:
Pinpoint Problems:
All my supervisor (the client) knew at the start of my internship was that the current website wasn't working. It was my job to pinpoint what the concrete problems were (below).
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Requesting the client to show comparable sites helped pinpoint their preferences, and which direction to head in.
The client appreciated the cleanliness and clear hierarchy illustrated in this sites' design.
The client liked the cleanliness of the header but did not like how chaotic the video hero section appeared.
Problems:
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UI inconsistencies with alignment and hierarchy. Haphazardly aligned text plagued the original design. It was difficult to decipher the text.
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The website was designed on Square-space was new to me. Switching website builders was not an option.
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The original logo was not scalable and objectively outdated.
My Journey with Squarespace
I thought I'd dedicate a bit of space in this case study to
the struggle that was figuring out Squarespace.
Squarespace's entire advertising campaign is based on how easy it is to use. So why was it so hard for me, a designer with experience in Adobe Software, Wix, and Html/CSS to use?
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As a designer, I expected endless capabilities and flexibility. Squarespace is so easy for the general public to use since the content is kept within a neat framework; it's hard to botch it up too badly. However the limitations this creates can be extremely frustrating at times to work around.
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Here's a handy-dandy chart I found that breaks the differences between Wix and Squarespace down: (courtesy of webcreate.io)
The biggest transition for me was going from an unstructured editor (Wix) to a website built with sections/blocks (Squarespace). With Squarespace, you can’t move an element anywhere on a page. Squarespace only allows you to drag elements (called Content Blocks) into rows and columns. But..through the help of the amazing invention that is Youtube I beat the odds and am here to tell the tale ;)
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This was my first time using the Squarespace Website Builder and it definitely took some getting used to, but through combining research and CSS I was able to customize the website. The overall takeaway is a much cleaner and more attractive look.
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Extra step I took: Rebranding. The colors weren’t giving the right message, and the logo overall needed to be simplified.
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Here's a breakdown on some of my visual solutions:
Solutions:​
Text Styling:
Original Header text: font choice felt a bit bland
Updated header text: More Stylized font
Section length:
Original hero section: too large and risked losing users' attention. There was no motivation to scroll below the fold
Updated hero section: By condensing the hero section and showing a bit of the next section, users are motivated to scroll down and see more
Intentional Branding Decisions:
Original
Updated
Logo Redesign:
I respectfully suggested a rebrand to align the logo and colors more with the intended brand tone. This proved to be a framework for the rest of the redesign.
Updated
Results:
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My redesign increased website activity by about 140%
If I had more time...
During this project, I grew to be flexible and open to learning new things.
Design can be endless, however, implementation involves constraints. As a designer, I had to use those constraints to my advantage.
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That being said If I had had more time as an intern for Strength to Strength I would have liked to administer usability testing to find additional user pain points. Due to my time as an intern being rather short, I had to cut corners and did not have ample time to fully test out my work.
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Additionally, the rebranding was done rather quickly and I wish I had taken more time to come up with a more unique and practical logo. I believe my rebranding was an improvement, but I do see more room to grow.