DonateEquity Web Application

Timeline: 5 months

Role: UX Researcher, UI Designer

Overview

DonateEquity is a startup that connects donors to non-profit leaders and helps them process business equity donations (BED). To make BED more accessible for a wider variety of nonprofits (especially smaller to mid-size non-profits), our team of UX consultants helped design a multi-purpose web application that would be able to: educate non-profits, automate the process of BED, manage and collaborate the donation amongst multiple teams and stakeholders, and set up a hands-off approach for DonateEquity.  

Research Interviews

We first interviewed the DonateEquity team, to understand the process and the role they played. We then interviewed various non-profit organizations to understand their pain points, needs, and opportunities in accepting all types of donations, but specifically BED. We wrapped up the interview process by interviewing attorneys that worked with DonateEquity in order to make sure we understand the legal constraints and considerations we would have to include. From the interviews with non-profit organizations, we learnt that most non-profit organizations did not know about BED until DonateEquity contacted them. Our web application would thus not only be a tool to manage the donations but also a detailed resource for many involved parties. Below is a summary of our findings from all the interviews.

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Design Process

To achieve the above goal, with timeline and resource limitations, we focused on three specific screens and the flows between them:

1. Landing Page
2. Sign Up Page
3. Dashboard

After a comparative analysis with dot voting, we determined that our major focus while designing would be on clean, minimal UI with a simple, straightforward, and familiar layout with concise UX writing in order to minimize confusing jargon.

User Flow

In order to define the user experience and estimate the design workload, we started with a simple user flow that would guide our iterative design process.

Sketches and Wireframing

We started designing with multiple rounds of sketches, the finalized versions of which were translated low-fidelity designs in Figma. This allowed us to visualize the potential appearance of the site and explore how the design inspirations we discovered could be integrated into our product.

Testing

After we completed a low-fidelity draft, we tested it with non-profit organizations, DonateEquity, and attorneys. Overall, the non-profit organizations wanted to see pricing options upfront. They also wanted to see testimonials earlier, because it helped assure them about the prospects of BED. The DonateEquity team and the attorneys has similar insights, mainly on the types of questions that would be in the questionnaire. The DonateEquity team specifically wanted us to focus on the writing just as much as we focused on the design.

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Using the above feedback, we developed a UI design system to guide our next stage of designs. At this mid-fidelity stage, we did multiple iterations until we arrived at a design that we were satisfied with.

Limitations

We were unable to connect with any non-profit organizations that had previously fully processed BED before. There was also very little knowledge available to a novice online, along with sparse industry standards that might have guided our decision making. The lack of common knowledge about BED might also slow the adoption rate and its value proposition.

Future Considerations

The designs need to grow and be refined in order to support a fully functioning web application. For this, there needs to be constant collaboration with the development team in order to make sure the web application works smoothly.