Overview
Elevate Resiliency is a nonprofit organization based in Toronto, Canada supporting Black and racialized women recovering from gender-based violence. The organization’s website needed a redesign to better reflect its mission and improve clarity for potential users seeking help or community support.
I contributed not only as a UX designer but also helped shape product strategy—translating user needs into actionable recommendations and working closely with stakeholders to define success.
Problem Framing
The Challenge:
Users struggled to understand what the organization did and how to engage with it, leading to low inquiries and limited trust.
Client Goals:
Make the homepage feel more emotionally safe and welcoming.
Streamline access to contact and support.
Increase user engagement and clarity of mission.
Research & Insights
Assessed the existing experience using Nielsen’s 10 principles, identifying inconsistencies, redundant CTAs, and unclear hierarchy.
Heuristic Evaluation
Conducted 5 user tests revealing confusion around site purpose and lack of emotional clarity.
User Testing
Stakeholder Collaboration
Met with the client to align research findings with organizational goals.
Key Insight: The homepage was overwhelming and failed to communicate trust, safety, and simplicity—core values for their audience.
Strategy & Approach
I worked with the team to prioritize fixes based on impact and feasibility, framing the redesign into three key improvements:
Content Clarity: Rewriting copy for warmth, focus, and a trauma-informed tone.
Navigation Simplification: Streamlining pathways to core actions—getting help and joining the community.
Visual Redesign: Designing a calm, modern interface to reflect empathy and support.
We chose to focus on the Home page and contact page as high-leverage areas with the most immediate impact.
Design Execution
Based on the feedback from the usability testing, we created a user flow that was simple and intuitive for the user while also achieving the business goal of getting new users to reach out to the organization.
User Flow
The main concept for the design stemmed from the main theme of the earlier usability testing, “Needs to be more simple”. We focused the design for the Home screen around the concept that less is more and only included the need to know information.
By implementing the concept of progressive disclosure of information that was also used by the websites we analyzed earlier in the project, we were able to simplify the information on the Home page while also ensuring that the main goals and services of the organization were still clear.
Low Fidelity Wireframes
UI Content Writing
We rewrote the content to make the copy easier for users to understand while ensuring that the purpose and intentions of the organization were clear and concise.
Original Content
Vision
To provide a safe space for Black/racialized women and youth to engage in building their capacity for self-actualization.
Updated Content
Vision
To provide a safe space for Black/racialized women and youth to realize their worth and achieve their full potential.
Outcomes & Feedback
Users in post-test interviews found the new layout “much easier to understand” and “more comforting.”
Stakeholders expressed excitement and alignment with the new visual direction and content strategy.
The client planned to move forward with implementation and expressed interest in further improving engagement in future phases.
Future Enhancements
Though out of scope for this contract, I recommended long-term enhancements including:
Personalized intake flow for guiding users to the right resources.
Conversational interface (e.g., chatbot) to support users with greater emotional sensitivity.
Data-informed iteration using basic analytics for ongoing improvements.
Project Reflections
This project demonstrated my ability to balance user empathy with product thinking. By aligning user pain points with business goals, I helped deliver a design that was not only visually improved but strategically grounded. It also highlighted the importance of clear communication, simplicity, and cross-functional collaboration—skills I bring into any product role.