Two weeks to improve Shelter’s ‘Donate’ journey and increase the click-through rate (CTR) by 43%.
Shelter is a UK charity that seeks to end homelessness and bad housing while offering help and advice to people in need. During a two-week break in other UX work for the charity, I was asked by the Income Generation team to examine the performance of their 'Donate' landing pages.
The team provided me with the following:
•Data collected from various analytics tools and heat-maps
•A Miro board with earlier benchmarking research
•A list of assumptions they had about why the CTR was low
I conducted a quick heuristic evaluation and comparative analysis and found that the component being used by Shine could improve upon what Shelter was doing. I also conducted a split user testing session comparing the journey around the 'Donate' component on the Shelter website to the same journey on the Shine website.
The main issues with the journey were shown to be:
•Complexity of slider component
•Users didn’t understand the functions. They had difficulty selecting custom values and frequencies
•It took users longer to complete the task than it should
Based on the findings and user feedback, I proposed the following changes to implement:
•Favour the Button option over the Slider option, making it clear to a user that you can ‘add your own amount’ by clicking on a button (rather than a link)
•Make clear to the user the choice between ‘Monthly’ and ‘Once’
•Ensure all controls sit between H1 and the primary donate button
The results in numbers
After the proposed changes to the 'Donate' journey were implemented, the CTR went up ~43% YoY.
"Anna came to Shelter on a short-term contract. I was lucky enough to work with her as we looked at ways to improve the efficiency of our donation funnel. I brought Anna a problem statement and some hypotheses and she developed an excellent test plan to help put the 'why' to the 'what'. Anna's research thinking was meticulous. She really took the time to properly understand the context of the work and quickly got up to speed with the problem we were facing and what we may need to do. We didn't have a lot of time to make changes as we approached a big fundraising campaign, but Anna quickly developed the test plan, conducted the research and analysed the results. She analysed and evaluated the user insight brilliantly and came up with some suggestions from which we developed some targeted changed to a key component in the donate journey. This was responsible for approximately £100k of additional income in December 2021 alone. If we didn't have Anna this wouldn't have happened. I can't recommend her enough."
Jake Mitchell, Digital Product Manager (E-Commerce) at Shelter UK
