I joined GivApp in the very beginning of its go-to-market and at the very beginning of my design career.
A few financial planners in our city had been working on an application designed for fundraising for non-profit organizations.
GivApp takes the roundup financial model and applies the money to non-profits.
Further, it is accompanied by a web app to track donations for the organization.
When I came on the team as an intern, the initial designs were just shipped to development. When I left the company, I was the principal product designer initiating an app wide redesign.
My primary responsibilities were to design social media posts for the company.
This gave me a lot of experience working with design tools, photography, and typography while I reported to the lead designer.
I also helped create prototypes and mockups to help move the design ideas forward.
A main focus of my internship was research. To accomplish this, I spent a few months volunteering at each of the organizations that had signed up for our platform.
I conducted ethnographic research learning about their motivations, problems, and values while also collecting information for blog posts for our website and photos for our social media accounts.
Another research method we employed was focus group testing. For this, I assisted the facilitator (the CEO) in creating a questionnaire to lead the group forward. This proved essential in our user journeys.
In the years to come, my responsibilities changed as I grew as a designer.
Initially, the goals were simple. Being a lean startup, they had established their goals as such:
-Create a functioning MVP
-Gain investment money
Over the next year and a half, the first goal was accomplished which led to more focus on the second goal. After ideating based on our research discoveries and synthesizing our ideas over the next months, we determined that the goals needed to change:
-Increase trustworthiness
-Polish the UI
-Gain investment money
From our research, we learned that trust was a primary value for all the processes in each of our organizations.
In both our ethnographic research and our focus group testing we saw that money is a precious resource and thus very heavily protected.
From the organization side, they need hard evidence that spending money is worth it and agreement from their team.
Even though I had established rapport with the organizations, questions such as, “why not start a new program to accomplish [x] goal?” was met with answers such as, “It’s not a bad idea, but we would need to discuss it as a team first.”
This showed us that for our platform to become integrated into their processes, we would have to gain their trust.
Second, our focus group user testing proved insightful in a similar vein. We witnessed individuals using our MVP.
We learned when people are using their own money, they spend much more time reading the text on the screens and making sure they understand the next part of the process before they proceed.
This revealed many issues with our MVP as components didn’t work as expected and the user journey was clunky.
Ultimately, our team decided that we needed an app wide redesign: a UI overhaul and a usability boost.
I was promoted to lead the redesign as the lead product designer.
However, a month into our project, Covid-19 struck and the project got postponed like so many others.
From this, I learned to be adaptable in whatever scenarios life throws at you. Whether it’s a change in the business’s direction or a worldwide pandemic, resilience in design is now a pillar of my design identity.