Designing a multi-location retail model for donating to charities
Envisioning a new digital product for Charities Trust to streamline fundraising across multiple retail locations, ensuring effortless donation management.
MY ROLE
In this 8-week project, I took on the role of UX designer while also contributing to research and service design.
THE TEAM
UX Designer (me)
Information Architect
Service Designer
SKILLS
Service Design
UI/UX Design
TIMELINE
Sep 2022 - Nov 2022
Project Overview
Project Outcome
Charities Trust, based in Liverpool, has been a donations management organization for over 30 years. They help their clients raise money for good causes and essentially act as a middleman between organizations that want to donate and charities that require fundraising.
We aimed to envision a new digital product that offers effortless fundraising across multiple locations of a retail chain, who have fundraising needs from local to national levels. Charities Trust would receive donations from each location, verify the charities, and then pay out the funds to them.
We designed a flexible, self-service platform for Charities Trust that empowers retail chains to seamlessly manage and allocate donations across multiple locations. By simplifying the fundraising process and enhancing operational efficiency, the solution not only improved user experience but also positioned Charities Trust to scale their impact and support more charities.
THE ASK
Charities Trust, with Designit, envisioned a self-service model with which retail chains having multiple locations can select charities and fundraise for them with the help of Charities Trust paying out to the intended charities.
WAIT, WHAT DOES MULTI LOCATION RETAIL MODEL MEAN?
Ability, for the a location of a retail chain to...
Select one or more charities and fund-raise for them.
Ability, for store headquarters to...
Receive that money from the retail stores (sites) and send it to Charities Trust.
Ability, for Charities Trust to...
Identify selected charities in their database and pay out to them.
During the initial three weeks of our project, we focused on discovery.
We analyzed the client's materials through collaborative sessions, demos, user research, and multiple workshops. Through these activities, we gained a better understanding of Charities Trust's current services, its fundraising processes, tech systems, priority users, and their ask in greater detail.
OUR APPROACH
Fundraising Processes
Tech Systems
Priority Users
A self-service multi-location retail model gives such retail chains with multiple locations, the ability to select one or more charities and fundraise for them. This would allow Charities Trust to receive the money, identify and report (to the client head office) the fundraising progress by location, including the status and speed of payouts to charities and pay out to the intended charities and organizations.
We not only familiarized ourselves with the data systems, but also understood the requirements of the new digital product that was to be built on a low-code platform called Appian. This platform helps build apps and workflows rapidly, and is primarily designed for enterprise-level applications. Since we did not have access to it, we heavily relied on the Appian documentation available on the web.
We identified four priority users for the service, two from Charities Trust and two from the client's office. Charities Trust's Service Representative and Finance Representative, and the client's CSR Central Manager and Site Manager will be the ones who will interact with the service. Based on their roles, each of them have different levels of access to the information displayed on the digital platform.
For the next three weeks, we collaboratively built the blueprint.
The blueprint maps the full end to end experience from the end user’s perspective and the CT experience. Blueprint covers key product themes, epics and stories, actions and interactions for the users, operational considerations (systems and data) and areas for further investigation.
The Process
Themes & Epics
Finalising the Draft
We got 30 high-level user stories in the beginning from the client. These were then unpacked and more granular user stories were created, and mapped on the blueprint. By taking this approach, we captured every aspect of the user stories through each person's role's lens.
We identified 16 themes, each consisting of a collection of epics - larger bodies of work - that were further broken down into stories to achieve a specific goal. Under each epic, there were multiple user stories. With this, were we able to cluster all aspects of information in the blueprint.
We reiterated a few times to fill in the gaps as we got more information. We mapped the potential end-to-end product experience from the perspective of the key users, with consideration for how to enable this behind the scenes, with all data and systems coming into play.
A SNIPPET OF TWO OF THE SIXTEEN THEMES WE DEEP DIVED INTO.
To sum up, we delivered
A blueprint for the MVP experience to define the scope for detailed design including features & functionality.
An information architecture map and data prototype to define the key sections users need to interact with.
Screen concepts for signature moments in the overall product experience.
In the final two weeks, we designed the key moments in the journey.
We developed a prototype and information architecture based on the blueprint, using mockup data models to inform our key moment concepts for priority users. We went through Appian’s extensive documentation but had to work around certain limitations of the platform such as the way data is presented and the lack of customization options.
The longer-term vision of the project is a white-label product that will service a range of sectors. Hence, we had to consider scalability and brand flexibility while designing a conceptual vision for the future experience. Looking at functionality and interactions in key sections of the experience, we created a key product screens to establish a design direction.
OUR PROCESS, BEHIND THE SCENES.
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Shreya Mathur © 2024
Made with care in Chicago, US
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