Digitising the Edgemere Farms servicescape
to connect and inform the volunteers and motivate donations
Overview
Edgemere Farms is a volunteer-run, zero-profit urban farm in Rockaway, NY with a mission to provide produce, open space, and education to the historically low-income community.
DURATION : 14 weeks
PROJECT TEAM : Shivani Kolte and 3 other UX Designers
CLIENT : Vanessa Sies (Head Volunteer, Edgemere Farms)
RESEARCH METHODS : Competitive analysis, Information architecture analysis, Empathy mapping workshop,
My Role
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Led Research and Analysis of the project brief and managed project communication across team and other stakeholders.
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Integrated storytelling and design language consistently across website.
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Prototyped and conducted 3 user testing sessions to gain insight and deliver a well-informed product
Project Goals
After our Kickoff meeting with the client who is the head volunteer at Edgemere Farm, we identified our main goals for the project :
Tell Edgemere Farm’s Story
Edgemere Farm seeks to showcase their mission, history, team, and achievements.
Educate about Food Justice & Farming
Edgemere Farm seeks to educate individuals basic farming skills and a sustainable compost cycle.
Encourage Participation
EF prioritizes community participation and hope to get people involved.
Facilitate Support
As a zero-profit org, EF relies on the assistance of volunteers, donations, and collaborative partnerships.
How might we
Leverage the Edgemere mission and story to build an engaging platform and motivate higher participation.
Solution Highlights
Before diving into the process of solving for :
empathetic storytelling ; clear information and education ; and Support facilitation,
lets have a look at some of the highlights the final design achieved.
PRODUCT STRATEGY
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Providing easy entry and access to facilitate repeat engagement
The farmstand's hours and location vary with weather and volunteer availability. To streamline visits, an essential widget was added for newcomers, saving them from website navigation and boosting farm attendance.
(fig 1) Homepage with the 'Opening hours + locations' details widget attached to the hero banner
02
Strategic Storytelling to highlight and quantify the history backing the organisation
The farm's longstanding presence has significantly impacted a fresh-food deprived Rockaway community. To showcase this impact more effectively, numerical representation was employed to tell their story succinctly.
(fig 2) Information about the farm and its impact on the 'About Us' page.
03
Supporting the numbers with genuine stories - building a true emotional connection
To uphold organic processes and foster a close-knit community, emphasizing real people's experiences with the farm was crucial. This encourages participation and strengthens emotional connections over corporate structures.
(fig 3) 'Our People' page sharing the stories of various volunteers and the details of the long term volunteer team
DESIGN STRATEGY
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Simplifying information and educating people to drive the Edgemere mission
Employing effective information visuals to clarify the farm's mission and reinforce its core values, emphasizing the dedication to sustainability.
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Balancing the website with images and consistent iconography to overcome information overload
Ensuring a balanced information load on the website by utilizing appropriate accent colors and complementary imagery to maintain visual harmony.
03
Actualising the Edgemere landscape into the digital world to help build trust - map
Developing an customisable, detailed map plays a crucial role in transforming the farm from a physical location to a coherent digital presence, bridging the gap between the two realms and adapting to the evolving landscape.
(fig 4) The sustainabliity model employed by the farm explained through an infographic on the 'Sustainable Farming and compost' page
(fig 5) Homepage
(fig 6) 'Plan you Visit' page displaying the layout of the farm.
Exploratory Research
Ecosystem Mapping
Social Media Audit
Competitive Analysis
User Interviews
(fig 7) The Edgemere Farms Ecosystem map detailing their interconnections and interdependent relationships with various stakeholders
Ecosystem Map
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Identification of the main stakeholders and their interconnections to understand the nature of engagement with the organisation :
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Volunteers : Individual volunteer, Student intern
Consumers : Residents, Local restaurants
Visitors : Individual visitor, Group visitors
Donors : Scrap drop-off-er, Monetary donor
Event Attendee : Local residents, Visitors
Learning :The local community residents and People who learn about EF online to create an authentic narrative and highlighting the ongoing efforts for education. In addition to this, the website also needs to evolve according to the seasonality and timeliness of the content presented on it such as the weekly pop ups, seasonal produce and subjective opening hours
(fig 8) A collection of the instagram posts collected from the Edgemere farms instagram page giving insight into how the community naturally interacts with the organisation. Their curiosities, engagement behaviours and likes, dislikes.
Social Media Audit
We reviewed EF’s Instagram account and analyzed the various interactions to understand content they created naturally and users’ engagement and we found that :
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Users value the emotional bonding with EF
People’s stories, image with people and EF’s achievement tend to get more “likes”: usually more than 150, sometimes even more than 400
Information timeliness is crucial -
Users are eager to stay informed and up-to-date
including products on-sale, opening hours, upcoming events and more. -
Volunteers prioritize clear information
Volunteers look for clear expectations, including time commitments and benefits.
(fig 9) Curation of the elements the team segregated to narrow down on what were elements relevant to the redesign and would work in terms of story telling, impact and presenting flexibility through providing multiple ways of engagement.
Competitive Audit
We reviewed the storytelling, volunteering page, donation page, and events page of similar websites and concluded some key pointers.
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Storytelling :
– Convey organization’s mission with concise taglines
– Enhancing the human aspect behind the project through authentic pictures. -
Showing Impact :
– By highlighting stories and contributions of real people, and making them measurable for better connection -
Inciting motivation :
Through incentivising the experience of volunteering and clarifying what exactly they would get out of it. -
Offering flexibility :
Familiarising people with multiple ways to engage other than donating/volunteering and showcasing the various activities and programs they can participate in.
(fig 10) User interview in progress along with the details of the criteria used for the same.
Finally, to understand what the existing community members of this organisation had to say, we conducted interviews with them and zoomed in on two main motivations that drove people to engage :
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Empathizing with and appreciate EF’s mission and story, as detailed by one of the members, Matt (a local restaurant owner and long time supporter)
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And secondly, the desire to Connect with a diverse and inclusive community as marked by Jeff, a long term volunteer
User Interviews
Defining the various use-cases of the Edgemere community and optimising the IA accordingly to encapsulate the goals of :
Story-telling & Emphasizing Impact
EF seeks to educate individuals about their mission, history, team, and achievements.
Community Engagement
EF prioritizes community engagement and participation, with an emphasis on emotional connections.
As a zero-profit community farm, EF relies on the assistance of volunteers, donations, and collaborative fundraising partnerships.
Facilitate Support
Creating a User-Centric Information Architecture
After outlining the user motivations as such, we moved on to create the information architecture that suits our users’ needs, transitioning from Research to Design.
We split our pages into two categories: Information and Ways to engage.
We then identified three types of users: Newcomers, Participants, and Supporters.
Familiarising with the organisation as a Newcomer
As newcomers have little knowledge about Edgemere Farm, their purpose would be to explore what Edgemere Farm does. Therefore the key pages to be explored by them would include About us, Learning resources, Produce and Visit.
(fig 11) Information prioritised by Newcomers
Engaging as a participant and increasing involvement, exploring what else the Edgemere experience offers.
After learning more about Edgemere Farm, newcomers might transform into participants who wants to engage in lighter activities such as visiting the farm, attending events, buying produce, or dropping off her food waste.
Actively getting involved as a Supporter
After satisfactory experience on interacting with the farm, participants might transform into supporters who spend more time and effort engaging with the farm. They would volunteer in the farm, donate, or continue to drop off her compost.
Focus areas for Design development
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Building Trust
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Curate Authentic narratives and images
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Provide sufficient information to ensure transparency
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Ensure the information is up-to-date
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Keeping Diversity and Inclusivity in Mind
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Show how Edgemere Farm connects people from diverse backgrounds
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Highlight unique stories of individuals
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Design the site to be accessible for seniors and visually appealing to the younger audience
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Presenting Specific Examples of Broad Ideas
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Show instances of how Edgemere Farm’s missions and actions are impacting people’s daily life
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Conclusion
The team presenting our findings to the clients.
The project was successfully handed over to the client. A challenge while handing it over was the lack of availability of a robust technical team on their end which we solved for by providing them with clear instructions of how they could translate the designs on a website builder and equipped them with templates for the same.
Along with industry expert critiques and peer reviews we closed out with a happy and ready to implement design and a happy client as quoted below :
“Thank you for giving us this perspective of our farm, I think you understood it uniquely and brought out our farm’s work beautifully.“
Work for the future
Implement the Design to Squarespace
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Converting it into a Squarespace website
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Keeping up with the Updates on the website
Fill-in Text Copy
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Testimonials to be collected (consider IG as a source)
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Information targeted at applying for grants.
Explore More Humanized Visual Designs
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Test out the serif fonts to make the visuals look less corporate