The SnackChats team has angel investors ready to hear their pitch, but they wanted a conceptual website design to support their presentation. They approached our team with preliminary research and asked us to deepen their data, develop their company brand, and deliver a functional prototype to share with their potential investors.

Our team set out to better understand the problem space based on the statistics we were given. Looking at the current market, SnackChats is filling a gap by providing both supplies and mental health services. However, we were able to reference websites for organizations offering solely food services and noticed consistent patterns.

With this market in mind, we conducted 10 interviews with two target populations: potential volunteers and current members of the unhoused community. When speaking with potential volunteers regarding their wants and needs from this organization, we noticed common themes emerge. These potential volunteers need:

When speaking with members of the unhoused community, concerns centered around resources and safety, event location, and reliability. Members of this community need:

Based on the two user groups interviewed, we created personas to ensure these groups are kept at the center of our design decisions. This also pushed us to consider the unique circumstances that unhoused communities face, including technology limitations and stigmas surrounding mental health and food scarcity. This realization began to shift our design focus, as we recognized that the primary audience with access to this website would be volunteers, rather than unhoused populations.

During interviews, users stressed the importance of a quick, easy way to learn about the mission of SnackChats, asking for guidance on how to support this mission. When drafting our site map, we presented two options to our clients. Throughout our weekly meetings, the clients stressed the important role advocacy plays in destigmatizing the challenges faced by unhoused populations. By providing site visitors with a separate navigational section focused on this, we ensured the message of SnackChats could be spread and for this reason and our clients approved of this version of our site map.

With our site structure outlined, we then drafted our ideal user flows to help identify key features, interactions, and pathways. These flows focused on the tasks of increasing community engagement through donations and volunteering.

When drafting our designs, we considered how to best organize site information based on our target user groups. The clients agreed that the mission of SnackChats should to be front and center, with other important tasks like donation and volunteering further highlighted on the landing page. From there, we drafted preliminary site architecture based on high-priority tasks and the needs of our user groups.

When considering the content of the site, we wanted to allow room for SnackChats to grow and flourish. By providing our clients with logo variations, site font, and a consistent color palette, they are able to ensure any future deliverables fit their brand.

We tested our initial prototype with 11 members of our primary target audience, addressing the two primary tasks of signing up as a volunteer and signing up for monthly donations. In addition, we also conducted testing on 5 members of the houseless community to ensure that they could use SnackChats to locate services near them.  Both usability tests resulted in 100% task completion under 60 seconds for our target user groups. We also found room for improvement on the home, volunteer, and find services pages.

Throughout our tests, users sought out relevant information and shared how important these details were to their trust in SnackChats as an organization. Both audiences stated that the more event information given upfront, the safer they would feel volunteering or receiving services. In our revised design, we ensured that information was shared in an organized and transparent manner.

With a 100% task completion rate under 60 seconds and site branding that received a 90% positive response rate in target audiences, this project came to a close. We organized our branding and site assets, obtained final client approval, and were ready to hand off all materials to our client. We successfully delivered clear style guidelines and a fully functional prototype for our client's presentation to a panel of 3 angel investors.