Generous: Brand Development & Charitable Donations Platform
Key roles:
Founding Designer
Design system creation & brand development
User interviews & persona development
UX & UI Design
User testing & Optimization
About Generous:
Generous is a charitable donations platform and software that launched in late 2019. It began as a B2C fundraising platform with a focus on offering donors matching donations from corporations. Since then, Generous has switched focus to a B2B model by integrating donation software solutions and API into partner platforms.
Projects:
I was a part of the Generous team from company inception to MVP launch and beyond. Below are a few of the key projects and feature developments that I led.
We started from scratch, so it all began with user research
User interviews:
I created an interview guide so that, as a team, we were asking consistent questions and able to spot patterns and themes. I focused on uncovering the motivations, obstacles, and donation behavior of our interviewees.
Interview Guide
Synthesizing user research into personas
Based on themes in motivations, obstacles and donation behavior we started seeing in the user interviews, 2 persona types emerged
Brand development
The not-so-small task of naming a startup.
I led company brainstorming sessions and did market research on naming ideas using surveys that measured metrics like ability to pronounce, positive to negative associations, memorability, and how well it helps with an understanding of what company does. As you can see Generous won out over other names. The survey results gave the validation we needed to get stakeholder buy-in and come to an agreement.
Key survey metrics for naming
Ability to pronounce
Positive / Negative associations
Memorability
Does the name assist with understanding of what the company does
Logo Creation
I led the creative direction of logo development, which we outsourced to a talented graphic designer
Design System
As we developed the Generous platform, I distilled repeatable patterns into a design system
The fundraising platform
The design challenge of data variability: Designing pages for 1.5M nonprofits
Using data from the IRS we created a nonprofit database and corresponding web pages for all 1.5M US nonprofits, allowing a user to donate to any nonprofit on Generous.
The challenge was each nonprofit’s data varied greatly - some had close to none, some was very robust. So in order to handle this variation, I created design patterns that would display the robust data when available, and also gracefully fallback when there was none.
Post-donation: Celebrating the feel-good moments
In our interviews, people often reported feeling lackluster and underappreciated for their donations. So we wanted our confirmation screen to both show how their donation moved the thermometer closer to the goal, and take a moment to celebrate their donation.
