Goodwill
Re-Design

Helping donors find stores, understand donation criteria, and measure their impact by re-designing Goodwill's donation task flow

Role

UX/UI Designer
Product Strategy
Project Manager

Tools

Figma
Google Drive
‍Slack

Duration

4 days
View Prototype

Challenge

How might we help social impact organizations express their value, and inspire people to take action in order to drive change?

Overview

Goodwill's donation process flow was re-designed as part of a 4-day sprint within a 4-person UX Designer team, where we aimed to re-design and develop a 3-step web task flow, where users could choose their donation location, check donation criteria, and see their total global impact.

Map

About Goodwill

Goodwill is an American non-profit organization that provides community-based opportunities and programming for those with barriers to employment.
They operate in 3 distinct ways – through accepting gently used donations, they are able to sell in thrift stores, with a goal to keep items from the landfill and using generated profit to help power their up-skilling program for underprivileged individuals.

Qualitative Research

Goodwill contributes a large amount to community and sustainability initiatives, given their impact below.
Despite this impact, however, our team found striking statistics that showed charities like Goodwill are still struggling with keeping items out of the landfill: almost 1/4 of donated items are sent to the landfill every year.

Current State Analysis

To understand this, we continued our investigation to see where the root of the issue lay by conducting a current state evaluation of Goodwill's website. We found two main issues that could contribute to this disruption in the donation process.
There was a clear lack of uniformity and consistency in the information included about the donation process and criteria, on Goodwill's HQ website all the way to their individual Branch websites.

Interview Insights

When we looked to our interviewees, our initial analysis was validated.
Many people felt that the donation process was cumbersome, unclear, and uninteresting - people often felt they weren't making much of a difference since they didn't know if their items were ultimately being used.
Our Focus
How might we help people feel more confident and motivated to donate so that fewer items go to waste?

Sketch

Meet Tiffany

Before we set off designing, we developed our persona, synthesized from our user interviews, to help guide us.
Meet Tiffany, a Solutions Architect, who lives just outside NYC with her wife and 2 dogs. As spring cleaning approaches, she wants to declutter her home, and donate unused or nicely used items but isn’t always sure what charities accept.

Tiffany's Journey

Next we put ourselves in her shoes to understand how she felt in her journey to donate items to Goodwill.
She starts to write off items she could potentially donate, is unable to find answers to her questions, and, ultimately, when she drops off what she does think works, she’s feeling a bit disappointed, upset, and unsure if she was actually helping to make an impact.

Decide

Ideating

With ideating, we brainstormed an initial task flow for how we could achieve Tiffany's goals while also helping Goodwill maintain, or even increase, its global impact, especially when it comes to material waste.

Task at Hand

We then looked for UI and UX architectural inspiration from other non-profit organizations. 
We found that those sites with optimal usability utilized a "checkout-esque" process flow, where users had visibility into the items they could donate, the criteria, and the ability to keep track of their impact.

Build

Sketching it Out

As a team we iterated througha few rounds of crazy eights, voting on features and components we felt wouldbest work for this flow, and then pivoted to our wireframes.

Test

Finding Usability Issues

With our final iteration, our team was able to conduct user tests with 5 individuals over Zoom. We ask them to run through the task of our persona, Tiffany: finding a Goodwill near them, adding items they would like to donate, and checking their global impact. We found 4 main usability issues.

Key Revisions

We iterated through 2 more revisions, to create our final wireframes and prototypes. Along the way, we made sure to refer back to our persona and check in with our usability notes, as needed.

Final Prototype

With the above revisions made, we finally pitched our final solution. Below is a walk you through of the key features of Goodwill’s donation process flow redesign, through the perspective of our persona Tiffany.
View Final Prototype

Finding a Goodwill

Tiffany first navigates to the donation flow from the first page, where she is prompted to enter in her location before starting the process. She does not need to choose from locations or bins, but is shown all the results.
  • Redesign of home page, streamlined across chapters
  • Offer a step by step process to checking donation criteria
  • Find both locations and bins

Checking Donation Criteria

Once she's chosen her location, Tiffany can then go in and explore what items she can donate, and the criteria she must check in order for Goodwill to accept them, eliminating confusion on what she can bring in.
  • Offer a list of potentially accepted items across chapters
  • Showcase acceptance criteria
  • Input quantity amount to understand final community impact

Offerring Alternative Solutions

Here, since there is an item that is not accepted by this Goodwill location, she is offered to ability to both see if other locations will accept it, or potential uses if not - this gives her a way to keep the item out of the landfill by giving her options!
  • Offer other possible locations that accept items
  • Offer ways for user to "save" item from landfill if item is not accepted

Measuring Impact

Once Tiffany has chosen all her items, she then navigates to the final page where she can see the impact her donations will have on her community and potential tax savings. Already, she is motivated and excited to help!
  • Offer a list of potentially accepted items across chapters
  • Showcase acceptance criteria
  • Input quantity amount to understand final community impact

Next Steps

By the end of the sprint, we had a clear idea of some potential next steps to help us continue to monitor and improve this donation process.

Key Learnings

Since this was a sprint involving working with other designers, and a project manager, we walked away with some great lessons learned.
Have a question, feedback, or idea?
Feel free to send it my way, let's connect!
Copyright (C) 2022 Rhea Shah

Goodwill
Re-Design

Web Re-Design
UX/UI, Web Design, Task Re-Design
Spring 2022