Translating behavioral data into UX strategy for a nonprofit serving children’s social-emotional development.
They needed a shared understanding of how users actually experienced the site, what they were looking for, and where the digital experience was failing to meet them.
The organization had data, but no synthesis. Paid search was generating traffic, content was being created, and campaigns were running, but the connections between user intent, content performance, and conversion behavior were invisible.
I approached this as a UX research synthesis project, using behavioral data as a proxy for user observation. By analyzing website analytics, subscriber behavior, search keyword intent, and paid search performance against nonprofit benchmarks.
Users were arriving in a hybrid state: emotionally motivated and evaluating whether this organization could help them. Landing pages that failed to immediately validate relevance created a mismatch between user state and content and drove disengagement.
High engagement rates with low page-depth is a counterintuitive finding that most analytics reviews misread as success. In this case, it signaled a structural UX problem: users found content relevant enough to engage with, but the site’s information architecture didn’t give them a clear path to go deeper.
The behavioral gap between subscriber users and first-time visitors was not a statistical curiosity, it was a design opportunity. Returning, committed users and new, evaluating users have fundamentally different cognitive and emotional needs.
monthly paid impressions on average
higher CTR compared to average for non profits
engagement rate, exceeding standard benchmarks