By Jessica Aguero, Amy Badiani, Saurabh Sanghvi | DSO Team
Happy New Year!
Our DC, Pittsburgh and San Francisco teams are currently engaged with client development or with projects. We have also had students step up to lead initiatives to enhance DSO's marketing, recruit new members, and get course credit for projects.
In this report, we will feature our project with Ashoka Changemakers and discuss DSO's next steps.
Featured Project
DSO had the pleasure of working with Ashoka Changemakers on an evaluation and redesign of the two most visible and crucial web pages, within the context of a wider website redesign effort. DSO provided a thorough design analysis, user studies, final mockups, and recommendations for the future of the website.
Ashoka Changemakers is the world’s leading network of social innovators that, through collaborative competitions or "challenges," connects high-potential changemakers, their ideas, and resources. Operating under the mantra “Everyone a Changemaker,” Ashoka Changemakers' website is the portal through which social innovators around the world access people and resources to make their projects a reality. Changemakers is redesigning this portal and reached out to DSO to ensure that pages were easy to use, up to web standards, responsive, and consistent to make a fluid experience for the site's diverse users.
DSO thoroughly evaluated existing content, conducted several user studies, met with end users to assess functionality, and produced increasingly detailed design deliverables (from wireframes to high fidelity mockups). As demonstrated through user studies and surveys to the Ashoka team, DSO's deliverables incorporate Ashoka's values and human feel into a usable structure that can be applied to the remaining pages of the site.
DSO members Jessica and Hannah built a strong rapport with the Changemakers team over the course of the engagement, which concluded with a successful and widely attended final presentation and site visit at Ashoka headquarters.
A testimonial from the Director of Community and Product Manager
We worked with DSO on redesign for the home page and a major landing page of our site (200 thousand + users, 1 million + visitors per year). In the redesign, we focused on updating the pages to reflect contemporary design standards while giving a human face to our organization. Our team from DSO carefully learned about our organization's mission, history, and business objectives. They provided timely updates on their design and were responsive to difficult feedback. The end product was aesthetic, functional, and reflected our brand positively. Having worked with other professional design firms, we rate our relationship with DSO the most friendly, productive, and enjoyable in recent years.
What’s next for DSO?
Over the next three months, the DSO teams of students and professionals will be hard at work to finalize project engagements before the end of the 2015 academic year. Each project will be assessed with DSO impact framework to ensure the organization is contributing concrete value.
As the year ends, many of our talented students are looking for summer internships. If you are looking to fill internship positions with students from Stanford, Georgetown, and Carnegie Mellon University please contact us.
If you are interested in helping with the next steps above, have references, or would like to learn more about DSO opportunities please e-mail inquiries@dsoglobal.org.
Thank You! With your support, we are able to pursue our passion every day.
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