Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC)

Australian Wildlife Conservancy

Australian Wildlife Conservancy is the largest private owner and manager of land for conservation in Australia, protecting endangered wildlife across more than 6.5 million hectares in iconic regions.

The job was to research and enhance key user journeys on the Australian AWC website. Specifically focusing on how AWC can drive a stronger donation conversion rate and newsletter subscription uptake. I researched the AWC donor target audience through qualitative interviews, redesigned key user flows and user tested the outcome to iron out any kinks.

My favourite UX process to follow is the double diamond approach. I like how adaptable it can be and how we can always return to any part of the diamond if I need to. I used this process as the basis of this case study.

The interviews

The Client

I began by interviewing three AWC employees most of whom were from the marketing team. They had a clear idea of their strengths, one of which was that they had a big science community behind them, and were known for their articles and newsletter content. AWC newsletter subscriptions are popular among the demographic they call ‘grey nomads’ - the older generation with a passion for the environment.

AWC is very good at showcasing studies, research and appealing to people who understand conservation. This is great, it helps build trust for anyone looking to donate, but a content heavy website can be overwhelming for people who exist outside of this demographic.

The Audience

I then began reaching out to people who regularly donate to wilflife charities. I was able to find some ‘grey nomads’ who regularly volunteer and support AWC. But I also found people through other mediums including Askable, my UX Slack communities and my own network to find out how they engage with not profits and how they navigate the large sea of not profits and decide which one to donate to.

After collecting data from the interviews. It became clear we had two user personas.

… from talking to AWC and their supporters it was clear that the ‘Science Sally’ persona felt well catered for. For this project, I decided to focus on the ‘Motivated Max’ Persona.

So how does Motivated Max behave?

Max is a young professional with a deep care about the environment. He wants to leave a legacy for his children and feel certainty that the not profits he gives his money to will spend it wisely. He likes numbers and figures, but he also does have too much time on his hands. If you want to get a Motivated Max to donate, you better make sure your impact statement is clear and concise, and that you make it as easy as possible for him donate.

So how do we marry the client problem with the customer problem?

I got brainstorming…

Hypothesis and testing

I wanted to create a simple enough solution that the client could implement with ease. That meant making some simple navigation changes to the AWC homepage as well as dialing back some of that information rich content, that was so well catered to those Grey Nomad/Science Sally personas.

AWC lacked a short succinct impact statement to quickly drive that message in for people quickly seiving through a web page. There also weren’t too many call to actions. Whilst people don’t want to be overwhelmed with call to actions about donating and signing up, AWC had been quite conservative here, so adding a few for easy navigation was not going to hurt. I reordered some of the existing information, and then thought I would design a simple donation widget to put on the front page as well.

But before you get to see this masterpiece, I had to test my hypothesis through some user testing.

User testing

After capturing all the feedback I then iterated on the designs. To really improve the donation journey, it felt as though focusing on the widget placement, as well as the content on the front page needed tweaking.

The final product

After following the double diamond approach I came up with the following design. I made a web version and a mobile version for the project, but mostly chose to focus on the mobile version as that felt most relevant to the Motivated Max persona. I hope you enjoy it!