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People have often experienced frustration when searching for the right charities to donate to, as they have been hounded from ineffective organizations in the past. They want to donate to causes that they have confidence in, and prefer to have freedom and control over the frequency and amount that they give.

Our app Giving Tree aggregates charities that are proven effective, and fall under the principles of Effective Altruism. There is no obligation, persuasion or marketing to the user, and they can customize their giving plan and take as deep a dive as they wish into the available research and criteria.

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First, we all hopped on a zoom call and created a hypothesis together.

We believe that users would be more involved in regular philanthropic giving if they knew that problems (ex: river blindness or malaria) would be solvable with sustained small donations.

Then, we all created a proto persona to test our hypothesis and assumptions.

This is Claire Silverstein.

Co-Founder & CEO of local consulting firm for small businesses, 41 years old

- Active in her community and loved by many - Shops and supports local - Has strong and unwavering core values -

She wants to give back to her community

She needs to know the most impactful charities to give back to so she knows she's making a real difference

She wants to make a difference in her community and in the world

She struggles finding the appropriate amount of time to research on her own

She doesn't know which charity is the most effective

She is overwhelmed with all of the options and possibilities on what to choose from

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Then, we decided to brainstorm a user research plan in order to get deeper into the mindset of someone who frequently donates to charities.

After our brain dump, we noticed that the most common theme of all was ‘decision making’ factors that go behind giving donations.

We wanted to explore and test this discovery thoroughly, and decided to integrate this into our upcoming survey and interview plan.

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←

So, we created a quick, 12 question survey in 24 hours, and got 41 respondents.

These were our 2 huge key takeaways.

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We also conducted 8, 1 on 1 interviews total.

It really enabled us empathize with our user and understand all of the different thought processes that go into donating to a charity, and again, we found a lot of common themes.

“I wish I could feel a stronger connection with global charities like I do with local charities”

“I prefer to give small amounts with regularity”

“I want to know that my donation is making a difference with real, concrete evidence”

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After compiling and sorting our survey and interview data on an Affinity Diagram, we came to a couple conclusions:

People want the freedom to donate whatever amount they want, at whatever frequency they want.

People want access to credible charities, where they know that their money will be well spent and impactfully count towards a change.

People want visual data that shows how their donations are making a real difference.

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Now with our research and data collection, it was time to tap into the mind and soul of Claire.

What Claire says:

"I don't have time to research charities thoroughly."

"I want to trust what I invest in."

"I want one-button giving."

"I would rather support solvable causes with proveable results."

Claire’s Pain Points:

Lots of blatant untruth and a lot of misrepresentation in telemarketing

Hates to click through info to donate

Doesn’t really research as much as she thinks she should

What Claire thinks:

Donating to charities and paying it forward is simply part of being a good human

It's important to see how your donations are directly impacting the cause

It's invaluable to help out friends, family, community members, beyond just in forms of monetary value

I wouldn't be opposed to donating to more national/global causes, I just lack the credible resources

What Claire does:

Part of her paycheck automatically goes to charity

She likes to give locally to community projects that help friends and family

She prefers to give small amounts with regularity

She donates to charities based on things that are going on in the world. Political factors, natural disasters, etc.

What Claire feels:

I feel that donating to a charity is part of being a good human being

I feel that the more informed I am about a certain charity, the more likely that I'll donate to it

I feel that I have to put a lot of trust on an organization in order for me to let go of my money to donate

I don't like to be pressured when donating

Claire’s Gains:

Seeing a direct connection between the financial support and the work that's being done

A platform will help narrow down my choices to donate towards. In other words, huge time saver

The feeling of comfort and validation knowing that her donation is going towards the right place and right cause

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After a couple iterations, we were able to come up with a user insight statement:

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And then a problem statement:

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We used the ‘I Like, I Wish, What If’ method to deliver Claire’s personal viewpoints about charitable giving, and then solidified our feedback through dot voting.

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After extracting the most agreed upon viewpoints, we sorted them in a feature prioritization matrix to focus on the most important features to include for our app.

I wish I could feel a stronger connection with global charities like I do with local charities

I wish I could see the results my donations have made

What if there was a source Claire could trust to let her know which charities to donate to?

What if there was a platform for all of the world's most in need charities in real time?

What if I could pay towards my charities of interest in small, frequent installments, all in one place?

What if there was a recurring donation process that I didn't have to worry about starting over with each time?

I like to donate at my own time and pace and not be constantly hassled by marketers.

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We connected our user’s main problems with valuable solutions and thus, created our value proposition statement.

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Claire wants to give more globally, but is skeptical because of some frustrating experiences from her past.

She recently tried giving to a new global charity, but soon found out that they were poorly run and weren’t spending her donation properly. She was tired of feeling scammed and knew she had to find a more ethical way to donate.

During a nature walk one day, Claire’s friend told her about modern research and mentioned a philosophy called ‘Effective Altruism.’ Her interest was peaked.

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Claire quickly researches ‘Effective Altruism’ and realizes there is something she can trust in giving. She discovers an app called ‘Giving Tree’ that supports these practices, too.

She downloads Giving Tree and explores the app while educating herself on different global charities. She’s able to find charities that align with her values, will deeply benefit from her donations, and is able to see visual data to prove it.

Claire has finally found a regular way to donate that brings her comfort and joy: Giving Tree gives her confidence and trusts that her money will be used wisely and ethically.

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In order to evaluate and optimize the overall user experience through Giving Tree, we created a user flow to explore all of the different paths one might take to complete the main tasks: donating to a charity.

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A competitor analysis was conducted after the creation of our user flow in order to understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of direct and indirect competitors in the market. It also helped us gain a deeper understanding of the type of market we were working with in general.

Direct Competitors: Charity+, Beam Impact

Indirect Competitors: Independent Donator, Facebook Donations

>>> Here is our research >>>

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Beam Impact

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Charity Plus

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Facebook Donations

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Independent

Donator

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Alas… we began the prototyping sketches.

We individually sketched our own ideas of what the Giving Tree Design could look like so we could all bring some originality to the table.

It ended up working out quite well, because we had the opportunity to pick and choose ideas that we liked from each sketch, and used them all in one mid-fi prototype later.

First, here are our low-fidelity sketches -

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And now for our Med -Fi

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Since this project happened during COVID-19, we had to get creative with our user testing. We basically used Guerilla Testing method with our med-fi, but over Zoom video calls where we asked our users to share their screens and to think out loud as much as possible while moving through the app.

We conducted 8 user tests and gathered lots of useful insight on how to best iterate our med-fi prototype >>>

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Make a larger ‘Save to My Charities’ button and move it to the bottom of the page after the user has scrolled through all of the charity’s information
Enable users to go back on the on-boarding section
Change charity category labels by moving them from underneath to on top of or inside of the frame
Change the featured charity on the homepage
Create more space between buttons
Physically click ‘create an account’
Eliminate ‘How to Use App’ page and cut down the information

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Med-Fi Iterations are displayed here, and you can check out our first Hi-Fi iOS Mock-Up here.

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Med-Fi Iterations are displayed here, and you can check out our first Hi-Fi iOS Mock-Up here.

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Final iOS Hi-Fi Prototype >>>

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Some lessons learned

Next steps...

With an app like this, more user testing of our hi-fi prototype would have been beneficial in the details of flows and features, to make sure they were as intuitive as possible. We would’ve liked to have tested our high-fi prototype, but lacked the proper amount of time due to our presentation deadline.

It would have been nice to establish a color palette and more overall knowledge of UI/Visual design components. Towards the end, we had to settle with our current design to keep the cohesion and flow, so it would have been nice to tackle this earlier on in the project.

We also found some indecisiveness in splitting up the individual tasks - UX/UI is a whole new world to us, we didn’t know each other at all before, and are still working on understanding and discovering what our own personal strengths are. We brought everything we knew to the table.

Create a better, more unified style guide & color selection
Evaluate some local charities using EA formula as a test
Add social aspect to the app. Would allow people to make groups, or donate for special occasion (ex. Birthday, graduation, etc)
Put ‘My Impact’ information on the landing page so users can see their results when they first enter the app
Look into adding a third-party verification badge, or another aspect of social good

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Our Roles

Aaron - Effective Altruism research, Presentation

Bryant - Wireframing

Jenna - Project Manager, Case Study, and User Persona Development

Kira - Wireframing, Presentation

***Each independently conducted interviews and user testing

Before getting into the nitty gritty, we’d like to include that this project was extremely collaborative all the way through. We met before, during, and after classes, and attended daily group meetings outside of class that lasted anywhere from 1 to 3 hours.

Towards the end, we were in strong alignment and felt confident enough to break off into individual tasks, which you will see below;

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