The Opportunity

"How do you move from helping two million children living in extreme poverty, to helping 400 million?"

"How do you improve vaccine innovation, make your grants management more efficient, or scale up the number of refugees you’re supporting 200-fold?"

These are some of the challenges that are being solved by NetHope IDEA Journeys.

As the main partner of the IDEA Journey, Microsoft wanted to show this mission accelerating program at their partner conference Microsoft Inspire - however, the design of these pages on NetHope's subdomain website was not visually appealing enough to grab attention. The graphics were not appropriate, the information difficult to scan through, and pages were difficult to navigate. The existing WordPress theme didn't allow the customisation needed to improve the layout. With only a few weeks until the event, it was not practical to code new templates and a different approach was urgently required.

Our Solution

We were asked by Sarah at Stone Barrell to see if we could help improve the User Experience of the IDEA Journey webpages. We started by reviewing the current templates and created a page on a copy of the website to understand the constraints of what was possible within the current. At the same time, we created a demo page using a new theme to showcase what we could achieve.

Sarah and I decided to restructure the content and halve the number of pages to just three - an overview, the IDEA steps and how to get started. Parasola produced a design mock-up of the homepage using Adobe XD and when this was approved, the styling was transferred into code to build the page within WordPress. To save time, we reused the same headings and layouts on other pages and designed these pages directly within WordPress.

We took NetHope's brand guidelines (fonts and colour palette) and created bold sections to inspire nonprofits to take the IDEA Journey. At the centre of the redesign was an abstract representation of the 4 steps (Imagine, Design, Execute, Assess). NetHope wanted a big change on their previous diagram, which had icons which looked dated and mechanical. We chose a very minimalistic shape - the quadrant and the four NetHope colours and arranged these on a grid to create 4 icons that form shapes that meaning can be added. These shapes were then arranged in a pattern at the top of the homepage and then used as a motif throughout.

We enjoyed working with Sarah and Nethope and received positive feedback from Jean-Louis Ecochard, the Senior Director of The Center for the Digital Nonprofit and from Microsoft.