Justice Cream Website Development: Designing an online storefront and platform
Spring 2021
Develop for Good is an intercollegiate technology/design organization that aims to generate social good by providing web app and development services with non-profits. Some of our most notable partners include UNICEF, the World Bank, the Nature Conservancy and the World Health Organization. Check us out at https://www.developforgood.org/!
Project Summary
The end goal of this project is delivering a website for the organization of Justice Cream. Our team utilized design thinking to structure our approach of creating the website and providing the most optimal solution for Justice Cream. Through extensive user research, our team was able to identify the main problem that needed to be addressed while designing the new site. On another note, Competitive Analysis allowed us to extract key design takeaways and principles to apply during the early stages of wireframing and prototyping. To reinforce the organization’s identity, our team generated a style guide to increase brand awareness throughout all page layouts/designs. In addition to the style guides, we created moodboards to capture the look and feel the website should give off towards its visitors. After wireframing and analyzing feedback, our team transferred our designs to the CMS platform, Wix.com, to further iterate our designs through the browser.
The Team
Andy Griffin
Daniel Han
Adriana Valencia
Connie Lam
Emily Zheng
Fiona Wong
Lianna Kishi
Nina Oria-Loureiro
The Challenge
One of the main challenges our team faced was the limitations on fidelity of our prototype in Figma. Since the website would be hosted on Wix, we did not want to make our prototypes on Figma too high-fidelity since some design elements would not be able to transfer smoothly to the CMS platform. Although Wix allows customizability to a certain degree, many of its components and its editor are fixed and inflexible.
Another challenge our team encountered was ensuring that the Justice Cream website represented the organization’s objectives. The purpose of the website is to direct traffic towards donations, learn more about Justice Cream and their organizational mission and values, and increase sales of their ice cream, in that respective order. We needed to approach designing this website not only through the perspective of a dessert shop, but also through the lens of social impact and justice.
Solution
The primary approach that drove our team towards the solution, a newly designed website, for Justice Cream was heavily influenced by the human-centered design process. Through empathizing with the intended target audience, we were able to not only serve the objectives of the non-profit organization but also design the website to serve the needs of the personas constructed during our user research. The website mainly features many pages in which site-visitors can learn more about Justice Cream and their background, easily accessible donation CTAs to support the organization’s mission, and an “Ice Cream Shop” in which customers can buy ice cream and learn more about the partnered organizations associated with each flavor. There are many more features like the events, press and merchandise section that complete the website, but the ones mentioned prior are the features that address the projects main objectives. Visit the site: here.
Impact
The two main groups this project will impact is Justice Cream and their partner organizations. The success metrics of this project will be calculated many months after the completion of this project through a significant increase in conversion rates and more organization supporters/volunteers. Another valuable metric to inspect would be the amount of followers Justice cream receives that are directly influenced by the new website.
