My Role
• UX/UI Design
• Content Design
• CMS Page Design
• Information Architecture
• Content Design
• CMS Page Design
• Information Architecture
The Impact
Thanks to the new site updates and enhanced application form, volunteer interest has grown—and the Heifer Ranch team now spends significantly less time filtering submissions.
The Project
Volunteering to live and work on a ranch full time is very different from other volunteering opportunities that Heifer International offers. The Heifer Ranch team wanted to create a more informative experience for potential volunteers to better communicate exactly how much of a commitment it would be. This included setting up several new pages on the site and creating a new application form that was more comprehensive than the previous one.
The Challenges
Creating a new volunteer application experience caused me to reexamine the current one in order to determine what was missing. The general volunteer landing page had very little information about volunteering at Heifer Ranch and lumped it in with the more common volunteering jobs. Most people who volunteer with Heifer do so for less than 10 hours a week and work in a nice, air conditioned building. This is a completely different experience than working on a ranch. There are also several different volunteer positions at Heifer Ranch that someone could apply for, none of which were reflected on the application form.
The Solution
I mapped out the user flow and created wireframes, then used the CMS to build new pages and update existing ones. I added a section to the general Heifer International volunteer page highlighting the ranch and typical volunteer duties, which leads to a dedicated Heifer Ranch volunteer page with an overview of available roles. Each role links to its own detailed job page, and a new application form was created to include resume uploads and job selection options.
