FIC website redesign

The Foundation for Intentional Community is a nonprofit that has supported communities since 1987. It helps people find or build intentional communities: cohousing, ecovillages, cooperative groups, places where people live together around a shared purpose. It runs a global directory and a library of courses, and it makes real money from those resources.

The site was losing people before any of that mattered. Dropoff and bounce were high, and the research put the cause in three places. Navigation was frustrating and the content overwhelming and text-heavy. The visual design was cluttered enough that finding anything was work.

And the one that decided the whole redesign: new visitors could not tell the difference between FIC and an intentional community. They did not know what an IC was, they did not know who FIC was, and they left before finding out. An organisation whose entire job is being the entry point to a movement had a front door that never introduced the movement or itself.

Research ran before any redesign. I interviewed current users across four persona types, built empathy maps for each, and aggregated them into one picture of what people actually came for.

Alongside that, a customer experience workshop with a cross-functional FIC team, designers, researchers, marketers, developers and an actual user in the room. It folded in prior research, established which business priorities were real, and crowdsourced what users were trying to do rather than what we assumed.

The four personas are the useful part, because they are not demographics. They are stages of engagement with the same idea. The Newbie has little or no exposure to the concept. The Seeker is actively evaluating communities to join one that matches their values. The Starter wants to create and organise a community and needs guidance on structure, governance and sustainability. The Resident already lives in one and is thinking about long-term participation and contribution.

Read in order, those four are a ladder, and the homepage was not serving any rung of it. That framing is what turned an aesthetic problem into a structural one.

Then a content framework audit, which I led, before anything was drawn. The sitemap and content framework had to hold before flows designed on top of them meant anything, and we needed to see how content was actually grouped across the site. Related content was consolidated, duplicates cut, and the whole thing reorganised into a sitemap that a person could navigate. That audit is also what surfaced how much depended on the homepage: most users never scroll to the bottom, so what gets grouped and surfaced up top is close to the whole decision.

After research and analysis the team split the work to move faster. I took the homepage from that point on.

The homepage was treated as an argument with an order rather than a set of blocks. Introduce, educate, then help, then ask. Every research finding pointed at people leaving before they understood what they had found, so the top of the page had to spend itself on explanation rather than atmosphere.

The Communiversity was the clearest structural fix. It already existed and it was already the thing FIC sells, but its resources were spread across the site with no single entry, so people could not tell what it was for or how to use it. Consolidating it into one categorised destination was not a visual change, it was making an existing product findable. Resources account for roughly a quarter of FIC's revenue, so the case for it was commercial as much as editorial.

The directory search moved onto the homepage for the same reason. It is the single most used thing on the site and the main reason a Seeker arrives, so putting it behind a navigation item was charging people a click for the thing they came to do.

The content audit is what made any of this safe. Grouping related content, cutting duplicates and settling the sitemap first meant the homepage was surfacing a structure that actually existed, rather than promising an organisation the rest of the site could not deliver.

A homepage that explains itself is a homepage that spends its best space on people who know least. A returning Resident scrolls past an introduction they do not need. That was accepted deliberately, because the research was unambiguous about who was leaving and why, and the ladder puts their surfaces further down rather than removing them.

Ordering the page by persona stage also means no single section is optimised. Each one is good enough for its rung and none is the whole product, which is the correct trade for a homepage and would be the wrong one for a landing page.

The redesign was scoped to the homepage and the information architecture underneath it, not the full site. That kept it shippable and it means the deeper pages still carried the old patterns when this work handed over.

The homepage experience was rebuilt for an audience of 440,000 plus users, with the redesign projected to lift retention by up to 70 percent.

The information architecture came out of the content audit as a settled sitemap rather than a proposal, with related content grouped, duplicates removed and the Communiversity consolidated into a single destination.

The work handed over to usability testing with real users, with findings feeding back into the UI before the developers picked it up. The homepage was the first phase of a larger site redesign rather than the end of one.

Personas are usually where research goes to die, because they get written as demographics and then nobody can act on them. Four stages of engagement with the same idea is a different object: it has an order, and an ordered set of users turns directly into an ordered page. The structure of the homepage fell out of the research rather than being decided after it.

The most useful thing I did was not design work. Leading the content audit before touching the layout meant the homepage could group and surface things that genuinely existed. Designing the page first and discovering the structure could not support it is the standard way this goes wrong.

Putting a real user in the room with designers, researchers, marketers and developers changed what the team argued about. It is easy to spend a workshop guessing at motivations with the person who has them one invitation away.

The lesson I actually took was about running the work rather than doing it. Keeping the discussion open enough that everyone in a cross-functional room could contribute produced better answers than a tighter process would have, and most of my job at that point was making sure that stayed true.