Project details
- Organization. Gateway Regional Council.
- Sector. Community and social impact.
- Focus. UX/UI, information architecture, and accessibility.
- Status. Case study complete.
Community impact · Digital experience
Gateway Regional Council
Community impact made visible.
Organizing community programs, resources, and organizational information into a clearer digital experience.
How we got there
A team process, before my individual focus.
The wider redesign was a collaborative effort with the Gateway Regional Council team, moving through:
- Researching comparable nonprofit sites, including New York Cares and Robin Hood, for patterns worth adapting
- Interviewing people across GRC's key audiences, one persona group per team member
- Defining user personas and prioritizing the features and content each one actually needed
- Moving from low-fidelity layouts to high-fidelity Figma designs built for Wix's constraints
- Implementing in Wix, with custom code where its native components weren't enough
- Testing with real personas on desktop and mobile, then refining from what we observed
From there, my own focus narrowed to three areas: Impact, Events, and Grant Writers.
Wix + custom interaction codeFocus areas
What the work involves
- Information architecture
- Community resources
- Accessibility
- User journeys
- Stakeholder needs
- Impact communication
- Data storytelling
- Funder-facing information
- Grant-related information
Approach
One organization, three audiences.
Community organizations hold a lot of information that matters to very different readers, and a single undifferentiated page asks everyone to dig through all of it to find their piece. The work is about structuring one body of organizational information so it can answer all three without becoming a document dump.
Residents
People looking for programs and resources need to find what applies to them and understand how to access it, without needing to know how the organization is structured internally.
Partners & stakeholders
Partner organizations need a clear picture of what the council does, who it serves, and where collaboration fits.
Funders
Funder-facing readers need organizational data and impact information presented so it can actually be read and interpreted, not just published.
My contribution
Where I contributed most.
The wider redesign was collaborative. My strongest individual ownership included:
- Impact page
- Grant Writers
- Events
- Information design
- Usability testing
- Wix implementation
- Custom interaction where native Wix functionality was insufficient
Current interface direction
Impact page and Events.
The project is ongoing, so these screens are presented as current interface work rather than launched outcomes.
My contribution · Grant Writers
Built for the reader who needs the numbers.
Grant funding is one of GRC's main sources of support, so I focused the Impact page on making that data easy for a grant writer to actually use: scan the key metrics first, then open the year-by-year detail without sorting through a long list of statistics.
- 10,200 Residents engaged
- 5,680 Technical assistance hours
- 196 Partnerships established
All six categories, with year-by-year detail, are explored just below.
What testing revealed. During testing, one participant expected the entire expandable area to be clickable, not just the small dropdown icon. It was a small detail, but it changed how I think about interaction targets.
Custom interaction · Events
Too many events to just list.
Wix's page builder handles layout, not filtering. I designed a custom Grid/Calendar view with search and focus-area filtering built directly into the page, so residents can narrow a busy month down to what actually applies to them.
- Grid/Calendar toggle, so residents can scan a month or a list
- Keyword search across every event
- Focus-area filter, narrowing by program type
- Month navigation with a one-tap return to today
- Selected-day detail panel with time, location, and a direct link
The events shown above are the same representative demo content used in the working recreation below, standing in for GRC's actual calendar.
Try it
The interaction, working.
The production version runs inside Wix's Velo environment and can't run outside it, so this is a standalone recreation, separate HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, of the same interaction, built so recruiters can actually use it. Switch views, search, filter by focus area, and select a date.
↓ Real interaction, not a screenshot
MonTueWedThuFriSatSun
Design reasoning. Search and filtering sit above the calendar, not beside it, because narrowing "what's happening" mattered more than which month it's in.
The events listed here are representative demo content standing in for GRC's actual calendar, not real GRC events, built to show the interaction with realistic data.
“The fact you managed to take the events feature and make the calendar fully functional after the issues that were occurring is impressive.”
Joy Gichuha, Product Manager
Impact page, up close
Six years of impact, made legible.
The Impact page's job is turning six years of GRC's own reporting into something a funder or partner can read in a few seconds. This is the real chart from that page, six categories deep, recreated with its own data.
$3.815M
Funding secured for clients
Six-year total, 2020–2025
Funding Secured for Clients, 2020–2025
2020$150K
2021$450K
2022$1.5M
Highest year
2023$875K
2024$350K
2025$490K
GRC secured $3.815 million for clients over six years, with funding in every reporting year. 2022 was the highest year at $1.5 million.
Source: Gateway Regional Council's Impact page, 2020–2025.
Case study complete
This case study documents the completed strategy, design, and implementation work across Gateway Regional Council's impact, events, and grant-writer experiences.