1. Introduction

After two years of promoting our mission of building bridges between humanitarians and designers, fostering innovation in the humanitarian sector, we felt it was time to update our website.

While the majority of feedback recognised our website to be professional, they also highlighted a lack of updated information about our mission, structure, and activities. This prompted us to collaborate with our community to revamp our website, both on technical and graphic levels, so it would better embed our values for community, collaboration, and grassroots-driven efforts in humanitarian design.

In total, 15 community members volunteered on this project. We want to thank them in a very grateful way. Without them, the project would not have been feasible.

2. Metrics

| Objectives | highlighting our community members, better explaining our mission, improving the UX, enhancing resource sharing. | | --- | --- | | Community members involved | 15 people: Kadi Neeme, Piper Helmrath, Gwenn Descamps, Zuzanna Radkte, Surabhi Nadig, Caroline Roze, Gabriel Leal, Cédric Fettouche, Isabel Munoz, Thomas Jäger, Sue Wairimu, Lison Gueguen, Klara Jaromilova, Vasiliki Doropoulou | | Average team size | 6-7 | | Duration of the project | February 2023 - September 2023 | | meetings conducted | 22 | | Volunteering hours | 350+ hours | | Final pages | 18 pages edited, including 5 pages created | | Website | https://www.humanitariandesigners.org | | Expertise involved | UX Design, Strategic Design, Design Management, Backend Development, Frontend Development, Visual Design, UX Writing, Research. | | Research | 24 interviews and 11 replies from the survey | | Software & Platforms | Hostinger, Wordpress, Elementor Pro, Notion, Mural, Figma, Slack, Jitsi |

3. Objectives

We had many discussions on how to improve and redesign our website, as well as motivation for using a collaborative approach. From those discussions, we extracted the following overarching objectives:

• Clarifying our mission: our primary aim, as mentioned in the introduction, was to present and explain our mission more effectively. This involved highlighting the three aspects of our mission: raising awareness, providing education, and undertaking long-term practical projects to comprehensively bridge the gap between sectors.
• Developing a resource page: we recognised the critical role of knowledge sharing and focused on revising how to deliver resources and knowledge to the vast field of humanitarian design.
• Improving user experience (UX): we addressed minor UX issues from the previous design, ensuring that buttons and graphical elements align with user expectations. We recognised the need to restructure the information hierarchy to better cater to visitors' needs and effectively convey our message.
• establishing our brand identity: simultaneously, we worked on elaborating and improving our brand identity, taking the Humanitarian Designers brand to new heights. This effort aimed to establish us as a reliable and trustworthy partner in the field of innovation within humanitarian settings.

All these efforts culminated in our main objective: creating a more appealing and valuable website for our community members, partners, and allies. Our online presence is now a tool to further bridge the gap in our mission.

4. Method

We chose to base our process on the principles of transition design and lean product development. Instead of embarking on an extensive research phase, our approach focused on creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that could evolve continuously, while adapting to the changing landscape of Humanitarian Designers.

Guided by our values, we also opted for a direct co-creative approach with our community members. Since they are, as well, our primary users and audience, it allowed us to improve the website firsthand, bypassing the need for interpreting research findings. However, in response to community members wishes, we also conducted traditional research, interviews, and user testing to confirm our findings.