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Digital Advocacy

ACLU

TLDR:

Role:

Design Lead, Product Manager

Team:

Design Lead/Product Manager, 2 Developers

Duration:

March 2022 - October 2023

Methods:

Data analytics

A/B Testing

Usability Testing

Stakeholder Management

main stakeholder

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Digital Campaigns team

 

Team that is in charge of running digital campaigns on our email and website. This includes ancillary stakeholders such as our policy and advocacy team in charge of organizing ground actions in support of national issues.

Problem space

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Conversions on advocacy pages needed improvement.

 

As part of a larger ACLU.org initiative, I was tasked with leading discovery and design of ways to improve mobile conversions on some of our most highly trafficked advocacy pages on our website. This included any type of conversion action such as petitions, pledges, and sending constituent messages.

Solution

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Full page template redesign.

 

Creating a new experience that was both data and user research informed.

problem

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We lose about 515,000 potential new users on mobile year over year.

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  • Key numbers:

    • Message actions were viewed 2.56 million times from 2021-2022

    • 50% conversion of those views into submissions/engagement

    • Conversion higher on Desktop than Mobile (53% and 46% respectively)

  • Scope:

    • Message Actions would be the MVP for experiential updates to our entire advocacy platform, extending to Petitions, Pledges, Regulatory Comments. 

    • Extremely outdated form template that hadn’t been updated in almost 10 years, so this was an opportunity to do some brand clean up and provide a consistent user experience to our users.

Goal

  • Increase message actions submissions on mobile from it’s baseline average of about 46% on mobile

  • Set a “no harm done” baseline of success, where if one of the variations does the same or better than the control, then it’s worth fully implementing

Solution

 

Some key screens below show our mobile focused UX redesign with an emphasis on efficiency. Jump to annotated specs for more details.

Updated branding

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Skimmable content structure

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Shortened form length

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process

 

WEBSITE AUDIT and Usability Testing

 

Auditing our current experience and conducting usability testing with 5 people revealed different areas of improvement falling under 2 themes:

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  • Ease of use ("I want an experience that is as frictionless and low effort as possible")​

    • Shorter message action experience

      • "I'm cringing at the form because it's really long... This feels like you’re trying to get my info too much without knowing what action [I'm taking]."  

  • Investment ("I want an experience that walks me through the process and makes me feel invested in the action"​​​

    • More motivating message action experience

      • "​I feel like [it's] more engaging [when] writing the letter was also part of the flow...I'm here for a purpose." 

  • Universal issues​​

    • Content structure

      • "This is a decent amount of information to digest [and the] content is kind of confusing." 

    • Social proof - too hidden, not motivating enough

      • "[A] goal indicator suggests to me that something is being sent. Seeing recent signers makes me think this is not [a] stale [action]."

 

I took these insights and created two variations to address the problem areas, discussed in the next section.

Exploration

Wireframes: single step and multi-step (mobile only)

Mid-fidelity exploration (mobile and desktop)

THe Results And Future

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Message actions soft launched in October 2023 after a successful A/B test run, in which the single step action form won by a small margin of 5% over the original control. We've been very excited to make this much needed redesign and continue to iterate on top of it. 

Final specs for implementation (mobile and desktop)

Areas I would like to test in the future, based on general performance as well as user feedback are:

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  • Improved letter drafting experience

    • This was noted in usability tests as a particularly confusing part of the experience.​

  • Scaling this template across our petition and pledging platforms

    • Part of our continued modernization efforts.​

Exploration for letter drafting and scaling across other platforms

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