GivingDNA
Democratization of data was the driving force in the creation of GivingDNA. Non profits collect a lot of information on their constituents and donations and most of that information is buried in a CRM. When a fundraiser want to find a list of donors meeting certain criteria, they generally have to file a ticket with their data analyst and wait a while to get back a list so they can get back to fundraising.
GivingDNA was designed to help non profits to breakout of this old system and bring intuitive data exploration tools to anyone within an organization, instantly. Such was the mission we set out on when first designing this product.
When we began efforts to create a fundraising tool that's easy and intuitive for everyone to use, we had no existing functionality to test or users to interview. We had internal subject matter experts, however, and all my experience designing other B2B products and well-thought out UX processes.
I began a series of UX research practices, brainstorming in structured meetings with subject matter experts, working to establish personas and jobs to be done and then coordinating across stakeholders to ensure iterations of features were growing in the right direction.
Once the larger systems and flows were designed it was time to translate the feature specs into design. As the goal was to move fast and get to a place where we had something to actually test, I designed a series of lo-fi UX design mockups. I then tested those mockups with our subject matter experts and engineers and iterated more.
Once I had designed some full, common flows, I recruited people for UX testing from 3rd party participant recruitment tools to interview people in our target market. From these research sessions I synthesized the data and presented it to the greater team to show why we had to make some small pivots in functionality.
As we tested and iterated our confidence grew and we sent the first features over to engineering to begin work. As engineering began building out the tech stack, I started writing the mobile first HTML and CSS needed to get the designs 'on the glass'. This stage is when I began to figure out the colors and typography of GivingDNA
