Build Up Case Study
Karen Organization of San Diego (KOSD) is an ethnic community-based nonprofit serving refugees from Burma in San Diego. In spite of undergoing a recent redesign, KOSD's Wordpress website lacks an online presence and faces a disconnect with their online community. It also falls short on usability for all parties, including the Burmese community themselves, sponsors, donors, volunteers, and individuals who wish to support their cause.
Our goal was to redesign the website and marketing strategies for KOSD to help create a welcoming space, improve community engagement, and amplify the voices of the Burmese refugees in San Diego.
🌲 Tram Bui - UX Researcher
🤍 Nicole Gong - Marketing Strategist
🎀 Mandy Lai - Web Builder
🎐 Sarah Liu - Web Builder
✨ Yvonne Liu - UX Designer
🍃 Kayla Luong - Content Strategist
Adam Syed - Product Designer @ Twitch
Michelle Ta - UX Designer @ Paradigm
Dewi Kreckman - Social Media Strategist @ DECUREMED
During Week 1, our stakeholders named their main concerns with their online presence. They asked for quality control across their pages and and new content to increase engagement. They also wanted a good strategy on social media outreach for their self-managed Instagram and Facebook accounts. Below are three of their “urgent action items.”
<aside> 🔗 Broken links
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<aside> 🖼️ Facebook feed image thumbnails not showing
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<aside> 📅 Need for News and Events calendar
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User Surveys
We sent out a testimonial survey to collect testimonials in order to empathize with the refugees that KOSD serves and collect emotionally compelling content that could help sway potential donors. The form received 41 responses, and we highlighted 3 on KOSD’s home page.
The results of the user testing session were that community members wanted:
Positive responses included:
To gain a better understanding of how we could address the problem, we conducted a series of user surveys and testing.
User Testing
We conducted user testing for our high-fidelity prototype with 5 members of the community and 2 community leaders. Half of these members spoke no English and only the Karen and other Burmese languages. To overcome this language barrier, we translated our prototype to Burmese and did a simple A/B Testing to have them choose what option of the website they liked better.
Some quotes from our user testing session:
“I see a lot of improvement, I will go through this with the staff!”
Based on our understanding of KOSD’s needs, we composed some problem statements that would help us address their issues.
<aside> 🔄 How might we refresh KOSD’s website, marketing, and content to increase community engagement?
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<aside> 📣 How might we amplify KOSD’s voice as a refugee community organization and build awareness for immigrant and refugee relief?
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Our design goals:
Our marketing goals:
After establishing our goals, We created a few user personas based on community member profiles. Some key points we wanted to highlight in these personas were the emphasis on educational program outreach, support system accessibility, and how broken links and lack of news service to help them with finding case management services.
We compared KOSD’s website with other non-profit organizations. When we did this, we came across a few elements of other websites that KOSD was lacking.
These elements are:
