Website redesign for a New Haven nonprofit, transforming user experience, accessibility, and community engagement. This case study examines the strategic website audit, phased enhancements, and user-focused design that created a more intuitive, impactful platform for NHSF, empowering students and strengthening donor connections across New Haven.
New Haven Scholarship Fund Staging Site (Password Protected)
The New Haven Scholarship Fund (NHSF) undertook a website redesign as part of a broader digital transformation initiative aimed at enhancing its online presence and improving accessibility for New Haven students, donors, and community members. Guided by insights from a VideoAsk survey, the project began with a comprehensive website audit that identified critical areas for improvement. The redesign implemented recommendations based on key performance indicators (KPIs) and heuristic principles, transforming the website into an accessible, user-friendly hub that supports NHSF’s mission to expand educational opportunities.
The project began with an in-depth website audit, informed by community insights collected through a VideoAsk survey. The survey engaged students, parents, and educators in discussions about NHSF’s online presence, providing valuable feedback on user experience and accessibility issues. This feedback helped shape the audit, revealing areas where the site could be improved to better serve its audience. The audit focused on several critical components: Key areas of improvement were identified, such as navigation structure, content clarity, and consistency across pages. NHSF established KPIs that would measure the success of the redesign, focusing on user engagement metrics, time on page, and application completion rates. Using insights from the VideoAsk survey, the audit applied heuristic principles to assess the site’s usability and functionality. This method highlighted specific design and content changes that would make the site more intuitive and accessible for users.
Based on audit findings, NHSF crafted detailed recommendations focused on improving website structure, navigation, and content clarity. Specific recommendations included a grouping related content under intuitive categories like “About,” “Scholarships,” and “Recipients” to streamline user journeys, clarifying scholarship eligibility requirements and application steps to ensure that students and their families could easily understand and access essential information, and standardizing fonts, button styles, and layout across pages to create a cohesive and visually appealing experience.
Following the recommendations, NHSF implemented a range of enhancements to elevate user experience and engagement. Key updates included restructuring the site to prioritize high-value content, such as the interactive maps that illustrate scholarship distribution across neighborhoods. And by introducing content that speaks directly to donors, reinforcing their impact on NHSF’s mission, and encouraging ongoing engagement through calls-to-action placed on each page.
With the redesigned website live, NHSF created a framework for continuous improvement. The team set up tracking systems to monitor KPIs, including user engagement, application completion rates, and donor interactions, ensuring that future refinements would be data-driven and responsive to user needs. NHSF also plans to conduct periodic usability testing and gather ongoing community feedback to keep the website aligned with its mission and evolving audience expectations.
The NHSF website redesign has yielded significant improvements, creating a streamlined, accessible, and engaging experience for its users. Key outcomes include the intuitive layout and clear application guidelines have reduced barriers, leading to a measurable increase in completed scholarship applications, the interactive features and simplified navigation have increased time on page and lowered bounce rates, reflecting a more engaging experience, and donor-focused content and consistent calls-to-action have strengthened donor engagement, with a notable rise in both retention rates and donations.
New Haven Scholarship Fund Staging Site (Password Protected)
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
"The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal."
