Evergreen Goodwill - Mentor Creative Group

Evergreen Goodwill Website

A regional thrift store and education center non-profit remakes their website

SERVICES

Brand & Identity Design
User Research
UX Design
UI Design
Web Development

Evergreen Goodwill has been serving the western Washington area since 1926, providing education and job training centers in 5 counties that help individuals improve their lives, find rewarding employment, job security, and build a brighter future. Evergreen Goodwill supports this effort buy accepting donations of gently used items and selling them in a network of retail stores across the region.

The Challenge

After many years of having an online presence, Goodwill needed to rethink their website to accomplish three major goals. First they needed to move away from an old codebase that was inflexible and required a high level of maintenance, to something more secure, easier to use and more mobile friendly. Second they needed to rethink how their site was organized to meet the needs of many different types of users that frequented their site. Lastly Evergreen Goodwill had recently overhauled their brand and needed to update the website top to bottom to reflect the changes.

The Solution

User Research

Through stakeholder and user research we identified five different audience types, shoppers, donors, learners, volunteers and the network of Goodwill employees and partners. Each audience took a different path on the website. Our content audit, information architecture and wireframe work was all driven by the goal of meeting the needs of these audiences.

Design Update

Goodwill already had established a new brand system but it had not been extended to their website yet. We worked in close collaboration with their creative team to bring the right look and feel to the user interface to match their brand. Then we designed a series of re-usable components that became the building blocks of the design of each page.

Development

Because of security, maintenance and mobile optimization issues, the existing Ruby on Rails codebase was shuttered in favor of a new WordPress site. Our development team worked hard to rebuild the site with the new content and IA strategy, as well as support many plug-ins and partner integrations. We also built custom features like an interactive map that helps user find courses in their county.