Giving Forward

Giving Forward is an organization that raises money for non-profits through ad streams.

The Challenge

Giving Forwards's challenges include:
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1 - Convincing users that the website is worth their trust.
2 - Juggling several landing pages with different concepts and designs.
3 - Creating an intranet that is capable of its high demands.

Discovery

When I started at Giving Forward I was the first designer. I would sit with my boss, who owns several companies, and clarify his ideas with him.

What this really meant for me was to speak his thoughts into laymen terms. At first his ideas seemed confusing, which I blame the Curse of Knowledge for. But eventually things began to make sense, and I had begun to piece together my bosses "internal Rube-Goldberg though process".

How it felt learning about "Cause-marketing" for the first time.

Communication Matters

Early on in the process I found that my findings contradicted some of the earlier assumptions of the website. The main audience for our competitors were different from who we initially assumed. And the tone of the project was aimed towards a different age group.

This is where I found that UX requires a good amount of patience. You need to understand where your leaders have their goals fixed, collect factual data, and find a way to merge the two without shutting down the good ideas presented on both sides.

CEO said our target user was older because of old statistics. My research found the opposite to be true.

“How can I compliment the company-user ecosystem?”

Is anybody else out there?

Being the sole UX designer on the team is a daunting task. There are so many things I want to do. Develop new features, improve copy, conduct usability tests, create assets, research, etc.

Finding an order of operations that compliments the rest of the teams development is something that I honestly still struggle with.

Eventually I discovered that regularly re-iterating the research, design, prototype, and development process was an effective way to stay on top of my tasks.

I can't count how many times I've switched from figma to notion... maybe I should just combine them together 😅

Development

The team at Giving Forward is diverse. Although I am the only designer, I work alongside a team of developers.

Each person is tasked with their own objectives depending on the skills they bring to the table.

Because I am working on the front-end, I am also tasked with developing certain aspects of the website so development can focus on technical backend coding.

Me tweaking the global theme on one of our Shopify landing pages.

Conclusion

Because I am currently working for Giving Forward, I would like to save my conclusions for later consideration. However, I have learned a few things throughout this experience:

1 - Numbers matter: I have become obsessed with keeping an eye on site analytics so I can leverage my designs to improve growth.
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2 - Understand everything: Although I still have much to learn, I have found value in understanding everything, including business practices that I overhear during meetings. This knowledge allows me to communicate with every team more effectively.
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3 - Patience is key: When I started out at this role I had the desire to do everything right away. I was used to a SCRUM environment, and consistency in my expectations. What I had to learn was that each company is different, and I had to find the workflow that worked best for my team. This could not happen overnight, but led to better results than the "one size fits all" process.