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Creating Impact with

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Role: UX Team Lead

CharityBay is a not-for-profit online marketplace where users have the opportunity to buy and sell items while directing some of the proceeds to their favourite registered charity.

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As lead in a team of four UX designers, I was tasked with improving the buyer journey on CharityBay's website by:

  1. Removing friction, and

  2. Increasing messaging around Social Impact.

We began with a research component:

Research goals

Then synthesized our findings:

Key Research Findings

We found that users fell into two camps:



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1) Those who place higher importance on social impact - they needed more indication of sustainable practices and more clarity around the donation feature of the site.


2) Those who place higher importance on the shopping experience - they needed to see more desirable products and get to the purchase more quickly.

We created two Personas to reflect these points of view:

Persona - Mikaela
Persona - Joseph

This gave us two key questions to guide our design work:

How Might We?

We began with the existing homepage:

Existing Homepage

And created an extensive re-design:

Redesigned Homepage

Our biggest impacts were in:

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1) Visual hierarchy:

  • Shopping categories were added to the top menu bar.

  • The search bar was brought to the top of the page and given prominent red colour as the first call to action.

  • Product cards were made large and image-based to highlight the products and make them more enticing.

This made the site immediately more familiar to buyers as an online marketplace.

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2) Social impact messaging:

  • The main image became an illustration featuring the messages "Shop Sustainably" and "Buy Local".

  • A donation counter was added, with the message "Every item supports Australian charities."

  • A donation icon was created with a heart in hand image, and this was carried through to the product cards to show the donation amount attached to each item.

This clarified and gave emotional punch to the charitable giving component of the website.

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As we continued our re-design through the buying process, we were able to remove two steps that were proven unnecessary in testing:

New User flow

One of our biggest changes was to the existing confirmation page:

Existing Confirmation page

Which we re-designed here below:

Redesigned Confirmation page

Our social impact messaging with "Thank you for making a difference, Mikaela!" brings home the emotional response, coupled with an illustration designed to stir the joy of making a new purchase.

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We added order number, email information, and delivery information to increase trustworthiness for the user.

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The final piece of the messaging around the dollar impact of the users purchase sits next to a call to action to advocate for CharityBay by sharing on social media.

The completely re-designed buyer journey:

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