I brought all of my new skills together with New Media Capstone. For this capstone, I worked with four other brilliant women to provide the nonprofit organization, The Backpack Project, with an easy-to-use template for their chapter websites. Throughout the semester, we met with the client, conducted user research, produced a standard Wix page for each chapter including a how-to guide, and presented our work at SLAM! I was the lead researcher and updated the project website, but we each dabbled in all aspects of the project. Ultimately, we produced a template and how-to guide that allowed TBP chapters to easily create and update their chapter content while remaining consistent with the main organization’s branding.
Featured Work
Our first step was talking with the client, auditing the nonprofit’s website, and perusing similar nonprofits’ websites for inspiration. I used Milanote to organize this step. To get a better grasp of The Backpack Project and our job, we looked at their mission, vision, and the overall layout of the website. We also took this time to decide on an SMS platform that would allow for the smoothest transition from the current website.
Soon after, we moved on to user research. Based on our exploratory research, we decided on three research methods: website analytics, card sorting, and in-depth interviews. The current website analytics helped us understand which pages were visited most frequently, the devices people were using, and how long people were staying on the site. Card sorting is a technique used to logically categorize website elements. We used it to inform menu navigation for the templates. In-depth interviews were conducted with three groups: main organization executives, chapter executives, and sponsors.
Project Website and Visual Design Guide
We sent the template and how-to guide to our client, but everything we produced throughout the semester lives on the NMI’s capstone project website. I dusted off my coding skills to upload our work in one convenient location.
