Upside Youth Mentoring

Supporting Upside’s rebrand with a fresh website.

Codesign
UX/UI design
web development
Managed application stack

Design and development of a new website utilising the Silverstripe 4 CMS.

Upside is an organisation dedicated to supporting young people in Aotearoa with adverse childhood experiences. Since 2006 they have been matching young people with volunteer mentors, creating over 700 connections and 6000 hours of mentoring a year. In 2020, after operating as Brothers in Arms for over 10 years, Upside felt it was time for a fresh name and look that better represented the organisation and community it had become. We took the awesome branding created by Studio Narrative and created a website for Upside’s potential mentors, funders and community.

Codesigning a solution the organisation really needs.

Before the visual branding took place, we undertook a day long codesign session with the Upside team, as this redesign was also an opportunity to build a website that better served the organisation’s needs.

User journey’s of key people who use the website and Upside’s opportunities to connect with them.
Goals, success metrics and signals that could be used to track the efficacy of the website.
A series of exemplar sites that shared similar objectives or audiences to Upside.
Creating low fidelity, high level wireframes of what the desired solution may look like.

From wireframes to reality.

These wireframes and exemplar findings formed the basis of the website design and information architecture that was worked on following the completion of the rebrand, significantly simplifying and reducing the amount of feedback and changes throughout the process.

Original wireframe

Wireframe of a page from the Upside website

Live page

Gif showing scrolling down Become a Mentor page

Other highlights

Flexible foundation

Upside has been working to develop relationships with organisation’s beyond Auckland. As well as general ease of content editing and adding new sections, the site was built in a way that allows for multiple campaigns and donations to be added that can house location or service specific content so it can grow as Upside does - while keeping simple and easy to use for users.

The need for evidence

Upside mentors have an incredibly positive impact on their young people. And you don’t just need to take the organisation’s word for it. They have put extensive work into research, videos, and interviews that all point to the specific benefits and outcomes of mentoring. It was important in the website’s information architecture that this evidence can be woven throughout the content.