Building Goodness Foundation — User Test and UX Audit

4 min readFeb 9, 2021

In order to illustrate User Testing and UX Assessments, I turned to Catchafire.com to find a charity or nonprofit that was looking for a complete Design Audit of their users’ experience.

I came across Building Goodness Foundation (BGF), a non-profit based in North Carolina. The ad asked for an assessment to understand if their goals, missions, values, and programs they offer were effectively coming across to users.

Research Overview

To start, I began navigating through the website to learn more about what the organization was, what they offered, and who they helped. In doing this, I completed a Heuristic Evaluation based on Neilson’s 10 Heuristics.

Heuristic Evaluation Overview: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ekj195UgWaNdgf7dv-dVmTdONEeCOvBN96LZrnYr2dI/edit

After browsing the website, researching more about the organization, and performing my heuristics evaluation, I was able to understand BGF’s reach and came up with a few personas to cover the target audience.

After establishing the target audience for the site, I moved into my user testing.

Testing

I completed five moderated user tests over the course of two days. Four of these tests were conducted remotely using UserZoom and one was in person.

I had my users conduct a series of tasks (three tasks for the first three users, then after gathering more information, I added on two more tasks for my last two user tests.)

Scenario: You’ve recently had some extra time during the week outside of your job that you want to spend volunteering in your community. After browsing google for different local charities, you come across Building Goodness Foundation.

Task 1: You want to learn more about the organization to see what it is they do.

Task 2: You want to understand.

Task 2: You want to sign up as a volunteer for their program.

Task 3: You want to give a donation to the Foundation.

Revised Tasks after testing 3 out of 5 users:

Task 2a: You want to find out the mission of the Foundation.

Task 2b: You want to partner with the organization as a third party company.

Some quotes that I pulled from my user tests:

“It seems like there’s a lot of options at the top… no clear starting point, a lot of info everywhere”
“Donations seem straightforward, explains exactly what you need to know”
“If I didn’t know any better, I would think I can’t volunteer…. I’m not skilled in any of these areas… but if I’m interested in just helping out I guess I’d email”
“The homepage is good information but the ‘learn more’ button leads you to information you should know after you have more context”
“There’s too much going on… a lot of it is redundant, too many links on the top. There are more links at the bottom that seem to take you to the same places”
“Having an email to set up volunteering is appropriate, but in the past I’ve had an actual person’s email, which makes it seem more official”
“ I don’t know what NGO and BGF are… it took me a minute to realize BGF was the actual organization”

Testing Insights

I was able to break down my main takeaways from my tests into three main categories — Navigation issues, Visual issues, and Organization of Information Issues. I found navigation and organization somewhat overlapped each other, but I wanted to keep the feedback manageable and easy to digest.

Navigation issues included:

A breakdown of call to action buttons (“Learn More”) lead to pages that disconnect with what the users expect.

No clarity around BGF versus C’Ville Builds (other side of the org)

Visual issues included:

Overuse of Copy on pages

No visual hierarchy on pages

Not much use of color in unique ways that attract users

Organization issues included:

Information on Homepage not direct, leaves room for users to assume

Many different avenues to get to the same page of information — cluttered for users

A lot of information displayed across too many tabs

Recommendations

Taking in these observations, I came up with two large recommendations to help alleviate user problems and allow the goal, mission, and reach of BGF shine through to users.