Project overview

Introduction

Purposeful is a philanthropic fintech startup that needed to validate their core value to their main investor Bill Gates in order to raise their next round of funding. They had concepts, but nothing tangible to help pressure test their ideas. I brought my expertise to the project with plans to help them turn their ambitions into a real product. * This project was focused on testing the product's value, as such, the visual design was intentionally left at a low level to give us more time work on functionality.

Project overview

My Role

I joined Purposeful as the Lead Designer and Design Consultant. I managed a small team of designers and worked hand in hand with the CEO, Project Managers, and Domain Experts. I was responsible for developing product features, providing user testing guidance, and delivering the many prototypes required for user testing.

Project overview

Product Overview

On the surface Purposeful as a product is pretty simple. Make the process for donating to charities really easy and by doing so increase the number of people giving donations. Under the hood however, the path to making donation giving dead simple is fraught with challenges.

People find it difficult to evaluate and select a charitable organization in the first place. How do they know that they can trust the organization with their money? Perhaps they have a specific issue that they want to support, how do they find opportunities and organizations that help with their given topic?

What gives Purposeful value as a product is that it strips away all of those hurdles that prospective donators have to go through in order to feel good about making a charitable donation. They envisioned a one stop shop that allows users to research organizations and and be the place of donation.

The Approach

Design Process

Starting more or less from scratch allowed me to really unfurl the entire design process on this project. We got to spend time working through cycles of research, ideation, wireframing, user testing, light visual design, light interaction design, and prototyping. At times, we worked independently as a design unit and at others we worked as a team with our colleagues at Purposeful. User testing was the focus of this project and we tested everything from high-level concepts, to A/B testing design features, to qualitative tests for overall satisfaction.

Research

Understanding what prevents potential donors from giving

The first order of business was figuring out how we were going to remove the blockers that discouraged people from donating. Luckily the team at Purposeful was armed with research about donation behavior, patterns, and demographics. They had already conducted their own user research in the form of donor surveys to help us understand peoples frustrations with the donating process.

What we learned through that data was that we had three main problems to solve in order to achieve Purposeful's product goals.

The Approach

Design Goals

1. Help donors understand where their money is actually going.

   One of the startup's biggest objectives was improving donor satisfaction and one of the strategies they decided on was making the platform "output" focused. As designers, we needed to help drive that idea home to the user. The core of the idea is that by focusing on the output that the donor is funding, they can have a real tangible understanding of how their donation has impact.

   
   

2. Make it easier to select and evaluate organizations.

   Our research showed us that most donors have a hard time when it comes to selecting what organizations to give to, this is why most donors give to large well known organizations that might not fully align with their donation objectives. By helping users find better organizations to give to we can improve their sense of satisfaction as well as increase funding to smaller or lesser known organizations.

   
   

3. Achieve a minimum of 70% user adoption in testing

   The purpose of this project was to help the startup secure their next round of funding from Bill Gates. While its nice to get excited about developing creative solutions, we also needed to be highly focused on the very real objective of refining the product in such a way that it can pass the user testing benchmark.

Ideation

Making Evaluating Organizations Easier

An interesting discovery that we made in the research phase was how difficult it really was to properly evaluate charitable organizations. Even if you manage to find an organizations financial sheet, what does the information within even mean? We explored lots of ideas to help donors make sense of this vague difficult to understand data.

Ideation

Making Finding Organizations Easier

Typically donors have their own personal narrative when it comes to charitable giving. We wanted to help align donors giving goals to organizations that match their interests. Sometimes they aligned to broad causes, particular regions, or the direct impact their donation could have. We built many design solutions that helped align users with their giving goals.

Ideation

Focusing on outputs to help donors see their impact

While our internal information architecture was Organization>Program>Output, there were places where the user can see all outputs under certain filters of their choosing. So a search for homelessness can return only outputs, but from many different organizations and programs. Each output shows the direct impact of user's donation and the user can buy those outputs in whatever quantity they'd like.

The Approach

Validating ideas through user testing

To be more efficient and not waste time I overlapped testing and design cycles, so something was always being tested and the design team was always either iterating based on testing feedback or building prototypes.

The Approach

Building the final prototype

In addition to creating lots of incremental prototypes to refine smaller aspects of the product, we were tasked with building a larger prototype for the purpose of measuring overall adoptability.

Validation & Insights

82% user adoption in user testing

Purposeful needed a minimum of 70% user adoption in user testing to get their next round of funding. Our final prototype received 82% user adoption allowing the team to secure their next round of funding from Bill Gates.