Materials for the Arts (MFTA) is a nonprofit organization supported by New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with
support from the Departments of Sanitation and Education. Materials are collected from individuals and business and then
made accessible to thousands of different educational programs across all of New York City’s five boroughs. MFTA collects
over 1 million pounds of reusable materials a year, to make available for free to nonprofits and civic organizations (MFTA
website).

Materials for the Arts is a New York City government funded organization and as such, the organization exist on two separate
websites, https://www.mfta.org and http://www.materialsforthearts.org. Information is distributed differently across the two
platforms. The government site is utilized for making donations and schedule appointments to MFTA. While the Friends of
MFTA site offers information on how to become more involved with the organization via volunteering, events and educational
programming.

To this end, Friends of MFTA has recently gone through a website redesign, with the goal of driving more users to its
website. The organization would like its users to be informed of the different opportunities it provides beyond donations and
scheduled appointments. In order to insure that prospective users are efficiently and effectively exploring the interface a
series of user interviews and observations were performed by a Pratt research team. The team has identified key insights
found from eight separate interviews and observations, and created user personas based on these interviews.