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Rethink about the social network for church in the digital context.
Redesign a Church Website
Background
As the pandemic worsens, churches experience sharp decline in membership and many of them are adapting to digital services.
CBC, as well, wants to explore effective methods for digital outreach to new members, yet their current website has very low conversion rate.
Project Overview
We redesigned the website for Cambridgeport Baptist Church to increase church attendance during the pandemic.
This is a capstone team project we did for CBC, a friendly and multi-cultural church community located in Cambridge, MA, US, and I was responsible for the research and design.
Time
6 Weeks
Role
UX Design, research
Interaction Design
Final Deliverable
Web Design,
Design Guideline,
Research Report
Problem
How can we redesign CBC's website to encourage outsiders to join CBC, even when they can't visit the church in person?
Solution
We redesigned the homepage to provide critical information for prospective worshipers, and created a more efficient and easier process for newcomers to join church events as well as get in touch with the church.
Homepage Redesign
New Search for Church Events
Streamlined
Event Registration
Research
Start the redesign with asking WHY
We talked to pastors, staffs, current members of CBC, as well as those who may become prospective CBC members to define the scope of this project, who is our target users, what are their needs, and what is wrong with the current website.
Picturing the Target Audience
Based on the interviews, we created two personas to help us better understand our target audiences:
- Christian looking for a new church;
- Non-Christian looking forward to learn more about Christianity.
Key Insights
Although the intrinsic motivation of attending church events differed in these two personas, they did share something in common as outsiders to CBC:
01
Most of the worshipers have the concern of whether they can fit in a new church before they go there.
02
Talking to someone in the church community/joining events provides critical information for outsiders, but pandemic just make it more difficult than ever.
03
There is a gap between deciding to visit the church and to really take actions. Trust is the key!
Reviewing the Current Website
The UI style doesn't match CBC's culture.
Lack of information in the home page to help build up the trust and confidence between church and outsiders.
Lack of call to action to encourage outsiders to get in touch with CBC staffs.
No detailed event information and hard to find event time. Users need to send an email in order to join a event.
Ideation
Build up trust between the church and outsiders - more detailed information, pictures and videos!
Easier way to search for events - especially the event date/time.
Design Goal
Reduce the efforts for joining events.
Use visual elements to communicate the culture and "personality" of the congregation.
Redesign the homepage
The rationale for homepage redesign is to provide meaningful information for outsiders to establish trust and confidence before joining the congregations.
We used affinity diagram to group and sort out the insights collected through the interview to define what kind of information our audience would love to know.
First Iteration
Second Iteration
Simplify the Event Search Process
In the previous experience, if the users want to look for a Saturday morning events, they may need to go through every page to see which event is on Saturday.
In our redesign, we create a event page that allow users to search events by time, date, and event type.
Before
Now
Deliver a smoother joining process
The online event registration process provides easier and smoother process for prospective church members to get event link.
Instead of struggling with writing inquiry emails, users now can get access to the link with only two simple steps.
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Step 1: Fill in contact information
Step 2: Send link
Step 3: Done!
Visual reskinning of the current website
There are two goals of our visual make over -
1. Convey the message that CBC is a dynamic, inclusive, family-based community which embrace and enjoy diverse cultures.
2. Put prospective worshipers at ease and express CBC's desire to have them join the community.
UI Style Guide
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Design Gallery
Final Thoughts
One the most important things that I learned from the experience of redesigning a website, is that we should understand the reason behind it, especially when we are considering a radical redesign, since it requires a lot of time and efforts.
The other thing is, although the event page make our target audience's searching process a lot easier, it could be very time consuming for the staffs to update the event information, and we should continue working on that to finalize our designs.