Project Overview

Interfaith Community Services is a nonprofit providing resources, treatment, and support to houseless and low-income individuals in the greater San Diego area. The project we accomplished for them was building a mobile application and redesigning their website to improve user-friendliness and internal content management capabilities.

My Role

I served as the project lead, meeting with the client stakeholders to identify the functionality objectives of the app and website, create wireframes, and managing the design, development, and testing.

The Challenge

Through our initial client meetings and assess of ICS’s current website, we identified several areas of improvement and new functionalities to implement. The main focuses of the app were to serve ICS’s donor base — providing a smoother process for donors to register for events, drop off physical donations, make financial contributions, & volunteer. The objectives of the website redesign were to improve overall user-friendliness using ui/ux best practices, reduce the use of external forms and platforms, and implement responsive design.

Solution

We redesigned ICS’s site (previously on SquareSpace) using WordPress in tandem with the powerful development framework, JetEngine. We decided to use Wordpress for its advanced built-in content and user management functionalities, and because we could securely self-host it on AWS. JetEngine enabled us to create advanced site logic — custom post types, built-in forms, data relationships, and action controllers — that allowed us to not only rebuild the content on their previous site, but also create a custom admin dashboard.

We built the mobile application by implementing Progressive Web Application logic on the website, and then creating an application wrapper to be posted on iOS and Google Play. We chose to use this method of wrapping the website, instead of hardcoding an application, in order to provide maximum easy of content management for their nontechnical team.

Results

We successfully launched the new site and app at a launch event in November. The creation of the internal admin dashboard enabled ICS employees to more smoothly manage service requests, volunteer sign-ups, and donor questions. The redesign of the website reduced the need for users to navigate to external platforms and enabled them to more quickly find information on the site, and reduced the team’s content management downtime. The mobile application enhanced the donor experience, shortening the path to donating to ICS which resulted in increased online monetary donations.