Outside the normal orbit: Ergomania and NGOs in the Netherlands
The Case
UX design for Fintechs, banks and financial startups is the everyday work of Digital Product Design company, Ergomania based out of Budapest, Hungary. On this occasion however we're also checking in to the Netherlands, where Head of Growth, Eward Bartlema now steers the Ergomania Amsterdam office. We're meeting to talk about three projects which are a little outside the normal Ergomania orbit: Dutch Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) that Eward contacted through De Nieuwe Gevers (The New Givers) - a platform to connect volunteers with charities and NGOs. The three that came through were Humanity In Action, Special Social Club, and DeliteLabs. Work for the first two is complete, although Eward smiles at the idea of any project ever being 'totally finished', and DeliteLabs is being finessed at the time of our chat. There's also a fourth Dutch NGO that Ergomania is assisting, which still has a little way to go. Eward explains the rationale behind this step into new areas, "I saw opportunities to do some non-financial projects, in particular these NGOs, which can also help our colleagues gain experience in different sectors, and have a positive impact in society. So it's a win-win. We have actually worked in this area a little bit before, with Sustainable Fintech for example, and a UK project enabling migrants to send money back to their homeland to help their families."
One slice of the cake
With financial clients, Ergomania often gets in on the ground floor, helping develop the thinking of what the client is offering, and stress-testing the concept. There will be thousands of iterations in the design, as complex flows are created and checked, long before the actual 'look' of interfaces is approached. With the Dutch NGOs however, these were already up-and-running organizations that had existing websites and communications channels. So what was Ergomania being tasked with? As Eward explains, it's sometimes difficult for some charities to even explain what it is they do. They have a great story, but is it being communicated in the most effective way? Also, is sufficient funding in the pipeline to ensure that programmes can be rolled out as intended? Eward decided that for sure help could be given with 'one slice of the cake' - analysing how effective the websites were, and making recommendations for change. To do this he brought in two Ergomania Budapest UX designers, Júlia Manka Szirtes, and Levente Blaskó. Manka says that she was immediately attracted to the projects because they are atypical for her, and definitely cool. She also agrees with Eward's point that gathering experience outside of the financial sector is good for her own career, and in broadening the Ergomania offering.
Julia Manka SzirtesAnalysing and recommendinge
Speaking of the experience gained in working with Humanity In Action, Manka says that her primary job was to do a heuristic analysis of the website, and then make recommendations - which came in at around one hundred suggestions. The website wasn’t working as it should, especially in being able to direct potential donors to the donations page. A few weeks after Manka reported her findings and discussed her recommendations with the Humanity In Action team, she was pleased to see that changes were being made rapidly, “It's really nice to see how fast they worked, and doubly so how much they wanted those changes.” She also refers to the slice of cake approach that Eward mentioned. Even with a website becoming more effective with much improved UX, there are still many other areas beyond Ergomania’s remit, such as marketing and social media. The Digital Design company did however look at the actual messaging of the website, and whether Humanity In Action’s story was being expounded as clearly as it could be. As Eward says, “When I first talked to them, they also mentioned that they sometimes have a difficult time explaining what they actually do.” Looking at Humanity In Action’s site now, it’s clear and logical, although as a transatlantic organisation in six countries, with three main levels of activity, it’s true that there’s a lot of inbuilt complexity to the concept. We’ll unpick some of that presently.
Levente BlaskóIn contrast, Special Social Club, the smaller organisation that Levi Blaskó was assigned to, has a simpler and clearer goal, but with a website originally put together by co-founder Jil Robbers. As Levi explains, “They were sharing a lot of things on the homepage and everywhere, and it didn’t have a master layout. There was a lack of focus in telling people what the organization’s values are, and the route to the donations page was…” He pauses to find the most appropriate, or polite description: “A mess.” A redesign was needed - something which Jil Robbers was happy to acknowledge. First step for Levi - heuristic analysis.
Getting heuristic with it
Now if you don't use this term in your daily conversation, let’s just check in with what Manka and Levente were doing. Heuristic analysis aims to enhance the usability and efficiency of a digital product. How easy is it for a user to discover and learn the product? Is it readily memorable (rather than needing continuous prompts)? Is the product flexible, especially in user satisfaction, and is the system tolerant of user errors? The goal is to deliver a better, clearer route for the user - Manka’s example of Humanity In Action’s donation page not being as accessible as it should be is a demonstration of there having been a lack of analysis in the past.
Heuristics focuses on usability, but this has to be evaluated against the intentions of the digital product, so defining the intended scope is an important first step. For example, fundraising is a must-have for most charities, not an optional extra, and this is the kind of mapping out that Levi and Manka first embarked on: What do you want to achieve with your website? Only when the intentions and goals were clear did the UX designers begin their analysis of how well the respective organizations were served by their websites. As Manka says, “First and foremost, charities use their website as a tool to get across their message, but they often have limited knowledge about good web design or good web development. So I found they were very humble and very happy with our contributions. They were able to use our examples, our list of recommendations, internally to say, ‘Hey, I talked to an expert. She says this can be improved.’ That's very powerful.” As to the timescale for the meetings, heuristic analysis and reporting, Levi adds that this was a smooth and quite rapid process, measured in weeks, “When I do an analysis, I really focus on what I’m doing. And when I’m focused, it's much easier to write about issues and make judgments of the website. I don’t ‘sleep on it’. My project - Special Social Club - was a small website, which was relatively easy to block through. There was no infinite scrolling! So it was easy for me to complete in a short time.”
More NGO projects in the pipeline
Before we visit Special Social Club and Humanity In Action, Eward gives an update on projects three and four. DeliteLabs looks like a startup entrepreneur program (and in some ways it is), but it’s designed specifically for young refugees and immigrants to the Netherlands, using the entrepreneurial process to develop skills that will enable them to enter the labor market. The organization’s digital footprint had grown organically over a range of channels, and DeliteLabs was looking for a rebrand and decluttering of the website. This is ongoing, along with work for a student consultancy organization HealthInnovaitors bringing together business, medical, and AI students to address the potential and impacts of AI in medicine. At the time of our discussion, Eward assesses that the project is about, “60 to 70% done. It’s rather bigger than the others, which is why it’s taking a little more time.”
Inclusivity and fun with Special Social Club
As is often the case, people drawn to working with charitable organizations connect because of personal experience. Jil Robbers’ younger sister, Joy, has mental disabilities which tended to exclude her from friendships and social activities, and around five years ago Jil determined something had to be done to address this. She is now director ofSpecial Social Club, an organization that creates events and parties for people with a wide variety of disabilities, and which is now operating in four cities in the Netherlands. Not only is the charity highly effective, and gaining traction, but - you may like to know - Jil’s sister is now in a relationship and has a much happier and wider social life.
Jil (right) and sister Joy at a Benefit Gala for Special Social ClubSo what exactly does Special Social Club do? Well, it creates a safe space for people to party, and attend regular festivals, such as the Amsterdam Dance Event, and about thirty other celebratory activities throughout the year, including marathon runs and art exhibitions. Attendance at these is centred around people with disabilities, but it’s also very much about integration. Attendees can ask for help from a ‘buddy’ - for example a sighted person to accompany someone who is blind - and everything possible is done to encourage people with disabilities to venture out into the wider community. Jil says that this even includes arranging to meet people at a station on their way to an event, and ensuring that once there they feel at ease in what can sometimes be a busy and loud environment. And yes, these really are parties, festivals, and ‘regular nightlife’ that the club’s ‘Happiness Team’ of volunteers take people to, while making sure that, “Everyone has a lot of fun.”
Jil herself trained in Hotel Management before seeing the need for the organization which was to become Special Social Club. She had no prior experience in marketing or fundraising, and when it came to creating a website she plunged into Wordpress and did her best. Over time Jil and her colleagues, Annabelle Koeleman and Martijn Draper received the feedback from participants that it was sometimes difficult to find relevant information on the website, and that the homepage was overloaded with information. “I thought, it’s going to take too much time to figure this out on my own,” Jil says. “So I needed to find some help.” Clicking on the New Givers site connected Jil to Ergomania, and from there to Levente Blaskó, who began the process by talking with her and learning the goals of the organization. As Jil explains, the website had to connect with three distinct target groups: Firstly, the participants, those people with a wide range of disabilities who take part in events and need to be attracted to them, and at the same time be assured that they will be taken care of… and have fun. Related to this primary group are the parents and carers of participants, who also need reassurance that the organization is safe and acts in a responsible way. They must be able to trust Special Social Club in order to send their child or young person to an event, so they are the ultimate decision makers. Thirdly, there are potential donors and sponsors who must be reached.
Redesigned, functional, and looking good
Jil is frank in recounting that she had no idea how to combine all this into a functioning, redesigned package, but after discussions with Levi, saw that it was possible. Following heuristic analysis, he was able to offer a range of suggestions to streamline the website - especially the homepage. The donations page was also an important area of focus, as the organization receives only patchy state funding and is reliant on donors and fundraising initiatives. There are two large companies which each fund around €30,000 a year, and Special Social Club also manages to raise money from activities such as teams running in the Amsterdam marathon, raising some €13,000 last year, along with auctions and other money-raising activities. Good going, but nothing compared to the ambitions of the organization. Jil says that she’d like to see expansion into new cities in the Netherlands, with the goal being 13 cities in the next 5 years. “We lower barriers for people with disabilities, in terms of partying, cultural events, and sports activities, so that everyone can participate.”
OK, so Levente did his heuristic analysis and made his suggestions, but then what? “He gave us so much information,” Jil says. “It was so clear, and I didn’t expect that - such detailed information.” As a result, Jil was able to hand on the Ergomania documentation to a volunteer designer, Bruno Silva Alves from S-A Design who began implementing the suggestions on the Special Social Club website. Jil adds that, encouraged by her experience with Ergomania, Special Social Club has now embarked on another website which is an events agenda to help point participants in the right direction for football matches, parties, ‘whatever’ - everything that is accessible to the target group. This time if funding comes good she’d like to check in with Levi before committing to the design! (And by the way, if you take a look at Special Social Club’s website, you’ll see that it’s all in Dutch. Not a problem for Levente apparently, who worked through translation engines and got perfectly usable and accurate results).
Humanity In Action
Julia Manka Szirtes’ assignment was also delivered rapidly and successfully, despite it being larger in scope than Special Social Club’s website. Humanity In Action is, ‘An international non-profit, non-partisan and non-governmental organization,’ whose ‘objective is to facilitate and promote a dialogue to understand and respond to the challenges that democratic societies face as they become increasingly diverse.’ It was founded in 1997 in New York by Judith Goldstein (who has only recently retired as Executive Director), and as well as the US headquarters, there are offices in Bosnia Herzegovina, Denmark, Germany, Poland… and the Netherlands. Luiza Braga has been the Dutch organization’s Communications and Community Manager for the last three years, and fulfilled other roles before that. So what does Humanity In Action do?
Luiza Braga“We offer educational programs - we call them fellowships,” Luiza explains. “These are leadership programs to teach young folks, students and recent graduates about topics of human rights, inclusive societies and democracy under which they develop action projects. They are one year projects that are implemented locally within their communities after they leave our collective learning experience. There are trends of anti-democratic practices and polarisation, which, particularly in the Netherlands, are trying to counter our educational programs. We want young people to have knowledge of human rights on a very practical level, so that they can tackle these things. But there are challenges in the world, which we continue to face, for instance, the post pandemic world that we live in. If you're a student or recent graduate between 18 and 25, you're bombarded with information, and you need to be really conscious about where you spend your time. To motivate these young people to participate in our programs, we have to make ourselves extremely relevant because for instance nobody wants to spend hours online anymore, so their tolerance for screen time has gone down.”
The need to audit
Luiza describes the route to working with Ergomania as starting with the desire to do a website audit, with special emphasis on improving the flows and making it easier for users to navigate. She searched the same De Nieuwe Gevers website that Jil Robbers had gone to, and found Eward Bartlema’s offer of help. Contact was made, and the audit took around two weeks, with Luiza commenting, “I was positively surprised how - because they were doing this on a volunteering basis - I always expect that the resources will be less in some way. But it was just really professionally done and is really helpful. The team acted as I would expect anybody that's working on a paid basis to act. So that was their professionalism, and their speed was really impressive.” The Ergomania team was Manka, Eward, and Dávid Taraczközi.
Luiza describes how they collectively went after the low hanging fruit to start with - the things that could be identified and fixed straight away. “This is going to be an ongoing process and recommendations that Ergomania gave us will be implemented in the course of a year. But I want to say that right away, there’s a lot that already looks better and feels a lot easier to use.” Two or three initial online meetings mapped out the problems as seen by the organization, and goals were set for improvements. “We wanted to be very straightforward and clear about what our ambition was and what Humanity In Action does as an organization. We wanted website users to have a clear journey when they got to our landing page, and we wanted to show what actions they could take right away, whether there was an issue, an event, or to apply for a fellowship, or even just things like reading a news report. So we had to prioritise items, and some needed action right away.” It wasn’t just a technical fix of the website that the teams saw a need for however, as there was a fundamental requirement to better explain the mission of Humanity In Action. Luiza says it was a mixture of design, user experience and copy writing that Ergomania engaged with, along with her organization’s National Director Jorien Janssen, and communications intern Jet Laven.
Starting local
Luiza describes a sophisticated and well-developed system of charitable funding in the Netherlands (as you might expect in such a liberal and socially-aware country), with - in the case of Humanity In Action - most funding coming through other NGOs, such as the Democracy Media Foundation which supports projects for media fairness, education, and journalism. Every year there are changes in the funding merry-go-round however, as old partners perhaps decrease their support, and new donor organizations get on board. As such it’s clearly important to have a website which is fresh, functional and easy to use. So how did the working experience with Ergomania unfold?
Luiza says that there were several online meetings to scope out the project, after which Manka, Eward and David made a presentation of their recommendations, then the ball started rolling. Luiza sums up the process, “We engaged with Ergomania through our Netherlands office to look at the Netherlands portion of our website. But our website is also international - it has different pages for different countries. I think this was a really good first critical look at the website, even if it was from a more national page standpoint, but it will also set a precedent for changes at the international level. We did a local audit, but the recommendations were so good, and are so applicable to other offices that I think Ergomania’s help will be extended further at the international level. These are things that we have been talking about organizationally for a long time, but now we actually have a list of concrete points, and that is really helpful.”
Celebrating success: Special Social ClubThe right to do anything
And a final word from Ergomania’s Head of Growth, who initiated these growthful projects. “I'm not a designer,” Eward admits. “When I looked at these websites, I had feelings of, ‘OK, this is an effective website, or this is not an effective website.’ Especially with Humanity In Action, from an ‘amateur’ point of view, it looked kind of flashy to me, and kind of nice. And then we did these analyses and I was surprised to see that there were so very many observations made by the team: Things that we could improve, ranging from critical items, through to ‘nice to have’, and that was quite surprising for me to learn. It was also interesting to see how professional and qualified our own people are in identifying these things. I'm sure when you speak to our clients, that they were also pleasantly surprised, and maybe even a little bit overwhelmed by the amount of information they got. They're already updating their websites because of our feedback, so that's very, very cool.”
“I'm a human focussed person,” says Manka. “But in any IT-related field it's very easy to kind of lose your soul. Here I got to work with people in organizations that I believe in, like Health Innovators, for example. It's a huge group, and they all have nine-to-five jobs day to day, like hospital residencies, and they work a lot. So they're doing things in their free time and have a lot of motivation and a lot of momentum to keep it rolling.” Levente is also impressed by what he has learned from working in the Dutch charitable sphere, where for him, “NGOs are a new area, where you can think of new ideas and have refreshed viewpoints. An organization that creates events for people with disabilities - they could be at home doing nothing, but instead have the opportunity to do sports, or go to parties, or whatever they want! I saw that I am just like them… and they are just like me. They have the right to do anything.”
Want to read more
about UX, fintech and banking?
Subscribe to our biweekly newsletter and get the latest of our news and thoughts!