Climate Cabinet is a data-driven non-profit organization that recommends overlooked local pro-climate policymakers to donors as a way to fight climate change.
Their current solution to providing donation recommendations is providing a PDF that compiles lists of candidates across the nation. However, this solution requires high maintenance with constant changes in each election cycle, and its form of presentation makes it hard to digest the great amount of content. Thus, the client asked us to identify ways to improve the donor’s experience of donation.
Current Climate Cabinet Website
Climate Cabinet now provides users with a PDF (Climate Cabinet 40) that compiles lists of recommended candidates only when user request it from their website. It consists of two lists, 20 seats to hold and 20 seats to flip.
Seats to hold are policymakers who tend to vote for climate-friendly legislation but are facing challenges from others.
Seats to flip are policymakers who tend to vote for climate-friendly legislation and have a great chance to get the seat.
The biggest limitation of this project is the lack of access to users. Our client didn't provide us with any access to their target user - the rich people for privacy reason. However, we still summarized the user's goal from the only interview they provided to us, and from interviews with audiences in similar situations - investor from the student entrepreneur center.
For donors, here are three main goals that we detected in donation process:
1. Find the most capital-efficient way to influence candidates(climate policies.)
2. Identify the most competitive candidate (high ROI local policymakers.)
3. Connect with recipients (policymakers that are willing to take pro-climate actions) and track the usage of money.
In the whole journey of donating, there are two points that did not meet the expectation.
1. Users can't comprehend the CC Score from the tedious paragraph without the use of graphics and reports.
2. Identifying candidates among the disordered list without a filter is inefficient.
3. The CC Score is negatively related to the priority of donation which makes users confused when they take action.
I audit some similar organizations' websites and evaluate them from several aspects. Those organizations are all non-profit organizations that call for donations. Three of them are related to elections, and the other two websites are related to programs for the public good. In the end, I concluded some takeaways from their pros and cons.
Based on the research above, I design a user donation flow, which includes understanding, browsing, identifying, and check-out, 4 steps in total.
After we came up with the user donation flow, we did brainstorm to collect ideas for the improvement of five essential screens. The five screens are the homepage, browsing page, candidates' profile, donation, and donation confirmation. For each screen, we list the goal of each page, how to achieve our goal, and design decisions on each page.
With the insights from our brainstorming, we created mid-fidelity prototypes on five key screens: Homepage, candidate browsing, candidate profile page, donation page, then finally confirmation page.
We improved the home screen with more engaging visuals and effective copywriting which demonstrate Climate Cabinet’s mission
The banner of quick donation on top provides a shortcut for donors to easily find and support a top candidate.
The carousel includes diagrams that explain to the donors what are the metrics being used in the impact score calculation
and how the candidates are strategically selected, which offers more context for those who are interested in learning more.
We decide to show one single score calculated from climate and potential scores simplifies the user’s evaluation process and avoids confusion from multiple scoring metrics. Climate Cabinet should refine the formula and evaluate whether such score distribution is accurate.
The informative candidate card on the top provides donors the most capital-efficient choice and saves their time browsing.
The use of icons and sections delivers the candidate’s basic information effectively. We also redesigned the layout and organization to make the info more digestible and comprehensive.
The searching bar and filter bars help donors browse candidates have their prefered features.
The combination of score map and candidates list view allows donors to preview candidates’ scores along with their location.
The drop pins on the map also give the user a general sense of relative scores of the region they are looking at.
1. Test prototype with national donors
2. Refine the Climate Impact Score
3. Evaluate flow with grassroots organizations