Overview
A redesign of the NPO, Feeding America website centered on equity and access. The product makes it dramatically easier for food-insecure individuals to find local food banks and resources, while preserving the donor-facing experience.
The Challenge
Feeding America's site serves two audiences: donors and food-insecure individuals in crisis. Its previous architecture favored donors, burying "Find a Food Bank" several clicks behind donation CTAs. For someone in a food crisis, those clicks are real barriers.
This project asked a core equity question: who does this design actually serve, and who does it leave behind?
Research & Competitive Analysis
A heuristic evaluation against Nielsen's principles, a competitive analysis of peer nonprofits (Second Harvest, local food banks, United Way), and a content audit of the homepage and nav surfaced four findings.
The homepage hero was exclusively donation focused. A food-insecure visitor had no path to local resources without scrolling past donation prompts.
"Find a Food Bank" lived in the footer, 4+ steps deep. Peers surfaced it in primary nav or a persistent top bar.
Copy centered donors in nearly every headline. People seeking help were addressed indirectly, after the donation ask.
Mobile performance lagged across the board, posing as a real problem since food-insecure users skew heavily mobile-only.
Information Architecture
"Find Food" moved into the primary nav as a priority item alongside "Ways to Give," giving the two core journeys equal visibility. A persistent resource bar on every page added a high-visibility entry point to find local food banks.
The homepage hero includes both a "Find food near you" search bar alongside the donation CTA, giving both needs equal visual weight.
Lo-fi → Hi-fi Prototyping
Lo-fi wireframes covered five page types: homepage, finder, food bank detail, resource hub, and mobile nav. Testers raced the lo-fi prototype against the original site to find a food bank in under two minute. The new IA cut that path from 4+ steps to one, and testers unprompted called the homepage "less like a fundraising page."
Hi-fi prototypes then extended the redesign across all five page types with updated tone, hierarchy, and a mobile-first component library.
Hi-fi prototype · Figma · Redesigned homepage and "Our Vision" hero · Find food near you and program resources
HI-FI PROTOTYPE · FIGMA · RESTRUCTURED FOOTER
Outcome & Learnings
The redesign cut the path to local food resources from four steps to one. More than a navigation fix, it showed that inclusive design means identifying who's most dependent on the product working, and designing for them first.
A clear hero, service button, and a footer/FAQ that eased navigation, optimize for the most constrained user to improve the experience for everyone. This project sharpened how I think about content tone shaping who feels welcome.