Black Women's Wall Street — Kimberly Abakah

Black Women’s Wall Street Fundraising Site Design

UI Designer
UX Researcher

Kimberly Abakah
Presidoe Okuguni

Overview

Black Women’s Wall Street (BWWS), inc. is an organization founded in 2018 that aspires to be the hub for black women entrepreneurs. Its mission is to empower black women by equipping them with startup business training, financial literacy, and fundamental education so they can go on to impact communities on a local to global scale.

Problem

BWWS currently hosts an informational site (pictured above) but it lacks a call to action. Our client wanted us to create a separate fundraising site that would emphasize the call to action to get users involved with campaigns, contributions, and volunteer/sponsorship opportunities.

Since the organization had not officially launched yet, this new site would also serve as a brief introduction to what
BWWS is about.

Solution

To create a fundraising website that

Informs users about why black women need opportunities to be involved in entrepreneurship
Informs users about what BWWS is and what it hopes to achieve once it officially launches
Educates users about the ways that they can support and ensure BWWS’ success (through donating to the campaigns and other facets + sponsorships)

Research

To understand how to best approach designing the initial site, I conducted 10 user interviews to try and identify some common trends between people and organizations dedicated to social causes.

Specifically, I was trying to gauge how much trustworthiness users had for these organizations and what it took for them to land on the ‘donate’ pages. Here are some statements that resonated with me:

WORK

ROLE

TEAM

DURATION

2 Months

The Black Women’s Wall Street Informational Website

Competitive Analysis

All in all, I noticed a number of important components that resonated with me while visiting each site.

Donate button placement
Statistics that checked out.
Other ways to get involved that weren’t monetary.
Engaging visuals, iconography, and a bright color palette.
The promise of community.

I kept all of these in mind as we defined our style and
created our wireframes.

For my analysis, I picked three organizations that were all dedicated to social causes.

Pencils of Promise

Black in Business - Goldman Sachs

This site was my favorite in terms of flow. The visuals instantly grabbed me. Coding is not a popular field amongst young black girls and can be seen as a field that requires more order and logic than creativity, but the visuals send the message to viewers that this is not the case. The homepage also includes testimonies, credentials, and information about its initiative.

Black Girls Code

Pencils of Promise is dedicated to empowering children through education. It is a standard nonprofit organization but it draws users in with its use of video. It is straightforward but also contains its credentials of how much the organization has already helped students. The end of the homepage features ways to jump in and get involved.

The Goldman Sachs ‘Black in Business’ initiative was the most similar to BWWS, located within Goldman Sachs ‘commitment’ section. Both have the same initiative of providing black women with business education and tools. The webpage itself is clean and starts by acknowledging that black women are underrepresented in business ownership (linking to its own research report). It talks about the benefits of the program as well as gives users the information they would want to know should they apply.

Key Takeaways

Moodboard

I wanted to incorporate BWWS’ green color scheme. I decided to add in yellow and purple to serve as two additional complimentary colors.

Sitemapping

Lo-Fi Wireframes

We narrowed down our sitemap and decided on six key pages to include. I created the About Us, Get Involved, and Donate pages. To emphasize the campaigns that BWWS wished to market, we decided to include them on the homepage.

Presidoe was responsible for creating the site map. We approached this as though we were creating a redesign of the informational site. This helped us better understand the BWWS structure and would eventually help us create a ‘slimmer’ version that told its story in the form of the fundraising site.

Hi-Fi Wireframes

Final Solution

In the end, the client expressed that they wanted a fundraising site that didn’t feel like a second informational site. Presidoe also made the decision to depart the project.

I decided to merge the content from each wireframe into one condensed, single-scrolling, storytelling page.

Clicking on header links such as ‘About Us’, ‘What We Do’, ‘Get Involved’, etc. would redirect users to BWWS’ main informational page, as requested. I wanted to have the scrolling experience answer the question, ‘What, and Why BWWS?’ as candidly as possible, for users to make sense of the later call-to-action to donate and contribute to campaigns. Citing the historical importance of how black women contribute to entrepreneurship would keep users engaged.

Campaigns can be added and removed as needed in the donate section. I created the prototype video above to hand off to developers.

Takeaways

Overall, I learned many valuable lessons from working with an official client and a partner.

Traditional approaches are important, but too much can reduce creativity, which in turn can reduce emotional appeal.
Stay in constant communication with your client to reduce design miscommunication
Communicate with developers about their capabilities as soon as possible - they heavily influence the scope of work.

The difference between the informational site and the fundraising site is the call to attention to BWWS’ programs and more instances to hit the ‘donate’ button. We reorganized the information hierarchy for cleaner storytelling.