Two weeks to improve Shelter’s ‘Donate’ journey and increase the click-through rate (CTR) by 43%

Two weeks to improve Shelter’s ‘Donate’ journey and increase the click-through rate (CTR) by 43%

Shelter is a UK charity that seeks to end homelessness and bad housing while offering help and advice to people in need. During a two-week break in other UX work for the charity, I was asked by the Income Generation team to examine the performance of their 'Donate' landing pages.

The team provided me with:

- Data collected from various analytics tools and heatmaps
- A Miro board with earlier benchmarking research
- A list of assumptions they had about why the CTR was low

I conducted a quick heuristic evaluation and comparative analysis and found that the component being used by [Shine](https://www.shinecharity.org.uk/) could improve upon what Shelter was doing. I also conducted a split user testing session comparing the journey around the 'Donate' component on the Shelter website to the same journey on the Shine website.

The main issues with the journey were shown to be:

- Complexity of slider component
- Users didn’t understand the functions. They had difficulty selecting custom values and frequencies
- It took users longer to complete the task than it should

Based on the findings and user feedback, I proposed the following changes to implement:

- Favour the Button option over the Slider option, making it clear to a user that you can ‘add your own amount’ by clicking on a button (rather than a link)
- Make clear to the user the choice between ‘Monthly’ and ‘Once’
- Ensure all controls sit between H1 and the primary donate button

After the proposed changes to the 'Donate' journey were implemented, the CTR went up ~43% YoY.

You can read the full case study [here](https://helloannastark.medium.com/a-little-ux-goes-a-long-way-shelter-donate-b106a55e216a)