Beautiful website analysis- Spent

Spent

This website is for Urban Ministries of Durham - an agency who provides food, clothing, shelter for homeless people. The purpose of this website to to raise awareness about donation for the homeless people and getting involved in helping them by volunteering in the agency.

The website lets users experience the financial problems faced by these poor people who are in need of help by challenging the user to survive with $ 1000 in a month  in a game as part of the interactivity of this website. This is an effective way of creating awareness by letting people experience the problems faced by homeless people because the people will know the hardship in the life of these homeless people and would create sympathy feeling in the each person who plays this interactive game. The sympathy feeling that the people have after playing this game would make the people decide to help and take action.

This game starts with saying that the agency helps 6000 people and that the users have to prove they don't need the help of the agency by accepting the challenge of this interactive game. It is a effective way of making people accept the challenge and play the game because people would be curious and would like to try out the game and try to prove by winning the game.

Actually in the game, users can never win to show that how hard it is to face the problems. After accepting the game challenge, you have to decide which job that you would like to have in the game in order to survive the one month. Then the game continues by giving users financial problems that are commonly faced by these poor people and lets users make decision about how they would face each financial problem in a day. This lets users know how hard it is to make decisions to survive financially and would urge them to take action.

 In the game, there is a an option of giving up the game for people and if you click on the button, there is a message saying 'This is too hard, isn't it?' and links to go to pages of how to get involved or donate for people who make their mind up to help in the end of the game. Every time when a decision is made, there will be a message saying about the pros and cons of your decision and a fact of how the homeless people face their problems. This is a creative way of laying out the information which can be over whelming

The images below are some of the financial problems that the user has to solve by making tough decisions with the end message of stating the pros and cons of the decisions:

Overall the art direction gives a serious solemn feeling which is the right mood to raise awareness and urge people to take action. This is a good website to raise awareness and has full filled its purpose

http://playspent.org/