Convio Design Portfolio

Websites

UNICEF - Inspired Gifts Website

UNICEF - Inspired Gifts Wireframe

The Challenge

The UNICEF Inspired Gifts program allows participants to purchase real, lifesaving products like bednets and vaccines to be shipped directly to one of over 150 countries where UNICEF is saving children’s lives. In November of 2007, UNICEF launched Inspiredgifts.org on Convio as part of a pilot Inspired Gifts campaign in the United States. The site performed well in its pilot year, but UNICEF was looking to make some major improvements to the user experience of the site with a new design and also to the administrator side of the site to make fulfillment and data management run more smoothly.

UNICEF began working with Convio in April of 2008 on a rigorous, 2 tracked project to improve Inspiredgifts.org. The project began with an intense research phase where the team took the time to understand and prioritize UNICEF’s goals for the new site as well as their user’s goals through stakeholder and user research. UNICEF also worked closely with Convio’s retained engineering team to prioritize and define new functionality to be added to Convio’s eCommerce module that would make the tool better suited for a virtual gift program like Inspired Gifts.

The Approach

Leading up to the development of the wireframes for Inspired Gifts, the team had conducted intensive stakeholder interviews, an audience survey of users who had just purchased an Inspired Gift, a landscape analysis of other virtual giving sites, and a thorough study of behavior trends and pathways users followed on the current site using Google Analytics.

The team also developed storyboards showing all the different decisions users may make on each page throughout the Inspired Gifts purchase process to ensure that every necessary option was included on the wireframes. The wireframes were backed by a huge amount of research and even though the team was really positive about the decisions that had been made, they also completed a round of usability testing on the wireframes to ensure that everything was working as it should.

The Outcome

The final design sets Inspired Gifts apart as its own brand, while still keeping it within the family of UNICEF. The navigation for the site is self-contained, which allows users to stay focused on purchasing their Inspired Gift while on the site, but a link to UNICEF USA is still available in case users wish to browse back to the home site.

The step-by-step instructions in the top-left of the homepage provide a quick way for users to see how to get started and the categories are still prominent for users who know exactly what they’re looking for. We’ve also included an “About” page to provide more information about the program and give users an opportunity to understand how UNICEF is the only virtual giving program where the gifts actually go to the recipient as opposed to being a donation used where it’s most needed.

Overall, the design is also more vibrant, clean and professional and the purchase process as a whole will be much easier for users to understand and navigate.