Amplifying 45 years of advocacy through mission driven content design

Launched a re-designed website driving 3.5% increase in new users

Women Employed’s story was getting lost in the noise

Women Employed is a Chicago-based advocacy non-profit dedicated to promoting gender equity in the workplace. Since 1973, they have continuously worked to effect policy change, expand education opportunities, and advocate for fair and inclusive workplaces.

Our client approached our team at 8th Light to address key organization problems:

Their name, Women Employed, attracted job seekers instead of advocates and supporters.
Their legacy website was run on Drupal, which was tedious and time consuming to maintain. Increasing website bounce rates, outdated content and degraded performance signaled a larger problem impacting their organization.

Results

Women Employed saw a significant boost in community engagement after updating its website, with improved results compared to the previous 12 months in the first year after the redesign.

3.5% increase in new users
50.2% increase in returning users
14.8% increase in sessions
17.8% increase in pageviews

Our team

My role: Project manager, UX Researcher & Design Lead

Contributors

2 Visual Designers
1 Front-End Developer

Client Partners

Director of Marketing (Primary stakeholder)
2 board members
1 in-house graphic designer

Project goals

Women Employed approached our team looking to engage a new audience, grow their supporter community, and amplify their mission impact through a user-friendly, custom-built CMS website.

Our business goal was to increase new users by 5% and return users by 15%. To do that, we set the following user experience goals:

Help potential supporters quickly understand the issues Women Employed supports and drive users to share and support their work
Tell Women Employed’s story in a transparent and authentically inclusive way
The website should be easy for Women Employed staff to update and maintain with little technical expertise

Data-driven content design

Using data from card sorting, I created a sitemap and evaluated content to determine which sections to keep, remove, or create.

I refined the content page-by-page through a content matrix and designed wireframes simultaneously.

To ensure the timely completion of the recommended content for launch, I collaborated with our primary stakeholder to prioritize what new content to create and how to leverage existing materials.

Validating the solution

After finalizing the wireframes and content, we needed to validate the new solution with users to ensure it solved the pain points from the original website.

We conducted a final round of usability testing and gathered some valuable insights.

Top Positive

Users immediately understood what Women Employed does after viewing the home page.

Users intuitively found and completed most tasks using the navigation.

Users liked how the “Our Work” landing page was structured and would like other pages to be organized similarly.

Top Negative

Users struggled to find specific resources. They weren’t sure what the purpose of the resource tab was.

When asked about taking action, users gravitated towards the topic of the action.

Users were unclear about the difference between the action center and the action network.

Learnings & Action Items

Reconsider the naming and order of “action center” and “action network” under the Our Work section.

Refine the language so that resource content is informative yet more supportive.

Create a more cohesive flow between events & volunteering.

Wins & outcomes

Outcomes