Project overview
The client
The Big Feed aims to support regional and remote Australian communities through food education and donations.
The Giving Circle is an initiative designed for small circles of up to 10 people to pool donations together, alongside other circles to fund one big community food project grant.
Kay, the Big Feed's CEO came to us to help identify the barriers and challenges that are preventing younger donors from donating and participating. So, we interviewed Kay to better understanding the Big Feed's challenges and goals.
The problem
From this interview, we gathered that young donors aren't grasping the impact of the Giving Circle because the donation context is buried in dense text.
As young adults (18-35 years old) are the ideal donors for the Big Feed's long term growth, we interviewed 7 participants for this research. From user interviews, we found that 57% of the 7 participants aren't motivated to donate because they aren't seeing the impact of donating to food education.
"Meaningful communication and involvement motivates donors to donate. However, when donors don't hear about the impact of their contribution, they're less likely to donate again."
Stakeholder Interview quote by Kay Richardson
Design objective
Help young donors see the community impact of their donation to motivate repeat giving to the Big Feed.
Top 3 recommendations
Storytell on social media
Highlighting communities directly impacted by donations strengthens donors trust of the Big Feed's impact.
Provide impact reciepts
Keeps donors engaged by showing where their money goes and how its being used.
Introduce micro tiers
Starting donations at $5 encourages first time donors to participate and build towards larger contributions.
Constraints — Recruitment + Sample size
This research is based on 7 participants each with their own donation background. We interviewed participants from the Harness Project's friends and colleagues circle as we had restricted access to the Big Feed's donors.
As the team interviewed a total of 27 participants, I selected 7 participants that most closely matched the Big Feeds donor audience: (18-35 years old) and interested in social causes.
Selecting 7 participants does represent a very small sample size, which overall does not represent all donors. However, it does ensure that the insights gathered are directly relevant to the organisation’s engagement goals, while also avoiding data from participants outside the intended audience.
Research
Heuristic evaluation of the Big Feed existing website
To start off, I need to familiarise myself with the Big Feeds website to better understand the organisations purpose and usability. I used Nielsen Norman groups usability heuristics to evaluate. This gave me a structured foundation to evaluate the site against established design standards before moving into ideation.
What this helped me understand
is that the Big Feed has an established visual identity. However, several usability principles were being overlooked particularly around information hierarchy, visual clarity, and guiding users toward meaningful actions on the site.
Key insights
The home page lacked a visible call to action, leaving users without a clear starting point.
Information hierarchy felt inconsistent throughout. E.g: past projects and impact were tucked away in the "About us" section.
The website also leaned heavily on text with limited use of real life imagery.
The repetition of the same colour palette across the site made it difficult to distinguish where users were on the site.
How this informed my research
These insights helped me identify specific areas to investigate further in my user testing. Rather than approaching research broadly, the evaluation allowed me to focus on key pain points, such as:
Whether users could find important information easily.
How the lack of a call to action affected their experience.
Whether the visual consistency across pages caused confusion.
Familiarising myself with competitors
To understand market opportunities and gaps, I researched into the Big Feeds competitors that had similar grant intentions.
I looked into each organisations: strengths, weaknesses, grant purpose, donor engagement strategy, donor incentives and grant guidelines.
What I realised
Having figures displayed gives donors confidence that their donations are making an impact.
Presenting real life images and stories allows donors to connect to the people that are benefitting from their donations. (As suggested in my "top 3 recommendations" for this research).
Only four survey responses
A survey was created by members of the design team to gather a better understanding of the Big Feed members needs and satisfaction.
The survey was sent out to the Big Feed community for two weeks. The survey was made up of 10 questions taking approx 5-10 minutes long. However, due to only receiving 4 responses, the data collected was insufficient for significant insights.
User research
25% of users matched the Big Feeds target audience
The design team interviewed 27 participants in person and over Zoom.
I contributed 3 interviews.
I focused on a subset of 7 participants of the 27 participants who most closely matched The Big Feed’s target audience.
The target audience is interested in social causes, has an understanding for food insecurity and are motivated to give.
The focus of these interviews is to:
Understand the challenges users are experiencing when using the Big Feed.
To identify what motivates participants to donate and participate in a cause.
"I would donate $20–$40 because it’s what I can give without putting myself under financial strain."
Interview quote from Kiran
"Usually I don't give $50 for donations… I usually give about $10 or $20."
Interview quote from Warner
Key user insights
50% of participants were overwhelmed by the noise on the Giving Circle page
Participants had to sift through dense text to get to the Giving Circle's purpose. Resulted in confusion, repeated reading, and difficulty understanding the core message.
"The concept makes sense to me. However, I do think that it's not visually laid out in terms of how the concept works."
Interview quote from Jason
57% of donors wanted the option to engage at different levels
Young donors wanted to donate but were intimidated by the $50 entry point. $50 is a high financial barrier for students, young professionals and small business.
Users were also intimidated by the prospect of creating a circle with 9 other people.
"$50 is like a uni students food shop. This initiative can be something that you're able to do with your friends like buying a few extra things in the grocery each week, that they can pass on."
Interview quote from Kiran
86% of donors wanted to know where their money went before donating.
Participants felt like they weren't contributing to something important. They couldn't see how the Big Feed was using donations to impact communities.
Theres also a lack of representation in the supported causes. It makes donors feel like their contribution isn't supporting people they want to support.
"I wouldn't be comfortable giving money unless there's more specifics around how the money is actually spent and how much of it goes to the actual recipient."
Interview quote from Warner
Archetype
Trudy - The cautious first time donor
Trudy encapsulates the essence of the donor interviews, ranging from their motivations to give to their financial backgrounds.
"Knowing which communities are in need and how the money reaches them would motivate me to contribute more."
Trudy
Who is Trudy?
Trust orientated, values driven and pragmatic.
Values community and wants belong to something bigger than herself.
Wants to donate across multiple charities.
What does Trudy value?
Connection to the charities she supports.
Being able to see her donations create visible impact.
Support causes that reflect her values.
What are Trudy's painpoints?
Feels unmotivated to give when she doesn't understand the charity.
Being unengaged with there being no CTA's.
Getting overwhelmed by poorly structured content.
Understanding the existing structure
This is a task flow of the existing website. This showcases where users advance and drop off. The friction points provides a clear view of the barriers disrupting user engagement.
One issue is that without any post donation follow ups, users donation journey abruptly ends. Having it end without any follow ups results into users disconnecting and forgetting about the cause.
Recommendations
Reflection
What I learn't
Asking thought provoking questions encourages users to explain their actions and reasoning, revealing deeper insights into their behaviour. Continuously asking why developed my thinking and understanding of users' motivations.
Slow down and critically examine my thought process. Poking holes in my assumptions allowed me to identify gaps I might be missing and could expand further.
Next steps
Given more time, I would complement user interviews with donor behaviour research and industry reports. This would provide evidence based insights into what drives sustained giving and how to reduce barriers to participation and long term donor engagement.
I'd also engage directly with the Big Feed donors to better understand their motivations, giving behaviour, and overall experience with the platform.
Feedback
Kay Richardson - Executive director & founder of the Big Feed
"I liked how you structured your narrative. I appreciate the storytelling techniques you used to visual the issues you discovered in your research. The heat map is a really idea I'm going to include to our website."
Warner Wong - Senior UX Researcher, Mentor
"Your recommendations were particularly impressive. There were many of them, but they felt well-justified, user-driven, and genuinely resonated with Kay, which is a fantastic outcome."