Redesigning XPRIZE

XPRIZE are a non-profit who hold competitions, which they call XPRIZES, that are aimed at solving some of the humanity’s most complex problems. In 2004 one such competition saw the first ever privately funded spaceship shot into orbit, for which a prize of $10 million was awarded. Since then, they’ve held competitions to attempt amazing things like cleaning plastic out of the ocean, making useable products out of carbon dioxide, and pulling drinking water out of thin air.

Spaceshipone on the redesigned Home Page

When the XPRIZE guys are in front of you, they’re dazzling, they’re exciting, they’re humbling. But their website is the complete opposite of that. The message is unclear, the pages are riddled with jargon that isn’t explained, and the navigation is a great place to get lost.

Here’s the current XPRIZE Home page and navigation:

My Role

In our team of four, I was one of the two visual designers. Together, we synthesized research from the good people in analytics and strategy to create a design that generates interest in XPRIZE, and aims to convert that interest into participation.

Research

We had analytics data (below) showing any visitors entering via a Competition page were dropping off the site, and did some testing to find out why.
The most common user journey is outlined here in blue:

Our Objectives Became

Reconsider Home and About Us pages to better explain what XPRIZE do
Redesign the Navigation for ease-of-use

Let’s change the website world, together

We began riffing on this slogan “Let’s change the world, together” to highlight different areas where XPRIZE create impact.

Explaining this rather lofty slogan is not a concise task. We also need to speak to a broad audience who have different reasons for arriving here, and are interested in different things.

We got to talking about how when you’re trying to explain something complex to someone new, you might sense-check yourself by saying “How would I make my mum understand this?”. From this idea I led a brainstorm titled “How might we make Mum care?”.

We might make Mum care through:

Great storytelling – reference to podcasts like Hidden Brain, Radiolab, and Song Exploder.
A personal experience – learning to scuba dive might make an you more concious of avoiding single-use plastic
Explaining the process – referencing content akin to ‘Chef’s Table’.
Personal ties, such as backing a team from the same country or state as herself

The Funnel Concept

The idea for site structure was to funnel users down from the Home page and have them develop enough interest to get involved. This could be as little as a return visit, or as much as joining a team.

All we needed, then, was to use one of the brainstorm insights to spark that interest. We presented a few concepts to XPRIZE, who decided they’d like us to lead with Causes (areas XPRIZE design competitions in, such as Environment) on the Home page as it aligned best with their internal Prize design process.

Say a visitor enters the site from the Home page and, like me, is interested in taking care of the ocean. She clicks into the ocean ‘Cause’ and checks out the Ocean Discovery XPRIZE. From there she learns about the teams and their stories and wants to get involved.

Our vision for getting users involved in the site is to splay out all the levels of Involvement in the global nav. It wasn’t in scope for the first round of development but is something XPRIZE will keep on the table as they work through improvments on the new site. Here’s a concept for our vision for involvement:

Navigation that will go live:

Visual Design Objectives

An immersive design is used within different Causes. So if you click on “Space” you are immersed an environment that looks like space, as with the Ocean Cause above.
White page design is used for all content pertaining to the XPRIZE organization.
Avoid photography and color typical of non-profits (blue, red, or orange)

Thanks for reading! Here’s the About page, one of the white designs.

Agency ––
Huge

Year ––
2017

Role ––
Visual Design

Creative Director ––
Dennis Steir

Alexandra Fitzroy is a multidisciplinary Product Designer, currently making digital products for Airbnb. Originally from Australia, but currently based in San Francisco, California.