Charitize
Website design
Designing charitable website for marketplace where volunteers offer their skills in exchange for donations to a charity, with buyers funding these services to support the cause.
Client
Charitize
Project Timeline
June 2018
Industry
Crowdfunding Nonprofit Tech
Scope of work
Product Design
UX Research
Interaction Design
TL;DR
Research
Competitor Analysis
After gaining an in-depth understanding of the project, we deep-dived into researching competitors. Charitize is a new concept, so we explored beyond volunteer organizations, and looked at successful marketplaces like Kickstarter.com to understand user onboarding and engagement experiences.
Key Insights:
• Onboarding: Create simple onboarding process with maximum 4 steps.
• Credibility: Verify and display volunteer credibility and trustworthiness.
• Options: Don’t overwhelm users with too many options.
• Impact: Highlight impacts created by users on home page to assert on their experience and difference they made.
User Interviews
We contacted 7 donors and 7 volunteers who had been actively engaged in a community, either through volunteering their time/services or making donations in the last six months. Below are the insights:
Design
Task Flow
Before beginning the design process, we focused on streamlining the user journey by mapping out the task flows for both buyers and volunteers—starting with identifying stakeholders and end goals, then linking them through key user interactions with the Charitize platform.
We held an intensive and collaborative design studio session involving sketching, sharing ideas, and team-wide validation to explore diverse solutions. My focus areas were the buyer registration, profile pages for each type of user, and buyer booking services.
Wireframe
We split into teams based on stakeholder groups. I worked on designing the following:
1. Buyer’s service booking flow.
2. Profile pages for Organizations/Charities and Causes.
Buyer’s service booking flow
This involved comprehending the buyer's motivation for seeking and utilizing services offered by volunteers. We generated ideas on how to evoke excitement in the buyer's experience within the Charitize platform.
Profile pages for Organizations/Charities and Causes
This phase involved designing both public and private views, carefully deciding what information to include or withhold. Guided by research insights, we explored key questions such as:
• Should a dashboard be incorporated?
• If yes, which metrics should it track?
• What specific features are essential for an organization's private view?
• Is it appropriate to provide access to a list of volunteers to buyers?
• How much information about a volunteer should be available to a donor v/s a community’s administrator
Prototype
We worked on a tough timeline to translate our lo-fi into hi-fi, constantly testing with users with multiple iterations and brainstorming sessions. Our goal was to create a platform that could incentivize the buyers, volunteers and organizations to come together and contribute to a cause.
Community Onboarding Page
Community profile page
Design Validation
During the last usability testing round, 15 users were tested the clickable prototype (5 users for each user type). Below is a summary of the findings from testing with the buyers:
Next Steps
The founders were very pleased with the final prototype and handed off all the files to their engineering team. Charitize is looking to fully launch in 2019.
FInal Thoughts
This was one of the largest projects I had the privilege of working on and it was extremely gratifying to see close to 180+ screens come together in the end. We all enjoyed working with the founders as they were deeply invested in their product and vision which pushed us to work even harder.
Personally, I learned the importance of visually brainstorming all of our ideas. It sounds obvious, but working with a product that had three stakeholders there were a lot of times we spent just ideating aloud without picking up a pen. Documenting each of our design decisions created a strong foundation to move forward as a team.