Amnesty International

Year: 2012
Client: Amnesty International
Agency: Razorfish
Field: Charitable
Disciplines: Product Design

About
Amnesty International is one of the most recognised human rights organisations in the world. Over two years at Razorfish, I worked with Amnesty International UK to rethink how it communicates with supporters and donors, online and off.

My Role
I worked on the product design from research and discovery through to the final page templates. Amnesty’s digital team were a fantastic client: they wanted more than an incremental update, they wanted the best charity site out there.

Approach
People rarely come to Amnesty to browse. They arrive about a specific issue and want to do something about it. So rather than a catalogue of problems around the world, the site is structured around individual causes and the actions people can take on them. The visual language borrows from Amnesty’s instantly recognisable hi-vis campaign placards. They appear as mastheads across the site and are pushed further on campaign pages. The challenge was letting that identity speak loudly without getting in the way of the task: signing, donating or sharing.

Design Concepts
Research showed that donating or taking action first meant registering, through a form far longer than the action needed. Much of that data was never used. We worked with Amnesty to cut it back to the essential fields, which significantly improved conversion on those pages.

Sitemap
The guiding principle was to take each supporter straight to the issue they care about. A page for browsing suffering around the world felt wrong for this content, so the structure leads with issues and actions.

Straight to the Point
Each action page summarises the issue in its opening block, then tells the reader how they can help.

In Depth
For readers who want to understand more, the page goes deeper as they scroll: background on the issue, Amnesty’s work on it, and further ways to get involved.

Templates for all Issues
No two issues can be told the same way. We built a library of action intros so the editorial team could choose the right opening for each campaign.