The Client
Inspired Gifts is an innovative program that gives you the opportunity to purchase actual life-saving items that will be shipped directly from both the UNICEF warehouse in Copenhagen and one of UNICEF's many suppliers to one of over 150 countries where UNICEF serves. While other organizations allow supporters to purchase "symbolic" gifts, Inspired Gifts are real items, such as warm blankets, mosquito nets, therapeutic milk, even School-in-a-Box kits.

The Problem
In November of 2007, UNICEF launched Inspiredgifts.org on Convio as part of a pilot Inspired Gifts campaign in the United States. The site performed well in its pilot year, but UNICEF was looking to make some major improvements to the user experience of the site with a new design and also to the administrator side of the site to make fulfillment and data management run more smoothly. In April of 2008, UNICEF began working with Convio on a rigorous, two track project to improve Inspiredgifts.org. The project began with an intense research phase where the team took the time to understand and prioritize UNICEF's goals for the new site as well as their users' goals through stakeholder and user research. UNICEF also worked closely with Convio's retained engineering team to prioritize and define new functionality to be added to Convio's eCommerce module that would make the tool better suited for a virtual gift program like Inspired Gifts.

How We Solved It
Leading up to the development of the wireframes for Inspired Gifts, the team had conducted intensive stakeholder interviews, an audience survey of users who had just purchased an Inspired Gift, a landscape analysis of other virtual giving sites, and a thorough study of behavior trends and pathways users followed on the current site using Google Analytics. The team also developed storyboards showing all the different decisions users may make on each page throughout the Inspired Gifts purchase process to ensure that every necessary option was included on the wireframes. The wireframes were backed by a huge amount of research. The team also completed a round of usability testing on the wireframes to ensure that everything was working as it should.

The Outcome
The final design sets Inspired Gifts apart as its own brand, while still keeping it within the family of UNICEF. The navigation for the site is self-contained, which allows users to stay focused on purchasing their Inspired Gift while on the site, but a link to UNICEF USA is still available in case users wish to browse back to the home site. The step-by-step instructions in the top-left of the homepage provide a quick way for users to see how to get started, while the categories are still prominent for users who know exactly what they're looking for. We've also included an "About" page to provide more information about the program and give users an opportunity to understand how UNICEF is the only virtual giving program where the gifts actually go to the recipient as opposed to being a donation used where it's most needed. Overall, the design is also more vibrant, clean and professional and the purchase process as a whole is much easier for users to understand and navigate.

Convio products used: Ecommerce, Web Content Management