Revise, Reflect, Refine, ReMatch
Thanks for joining The Pittsburgh Foundation MHCI team blog, as we push towards the final stretch of our 7-month project… from home!
We left off with our team completing a thorough prioritization exercise, identifying the essential job stories and features for our internal matchmaking tool.
Building off of these job stories, we created accompanying Jobs-to-be-Done for our key use-cases. Goal-oriented archetypes would guide our design better, we decided, than user stories or personas. Even within one user or persona, the use of our tool will differ dramatically depending on the goals, circumstances, specific grants, and/or specific donors. The three main jobs we detailed were grant-first matching, donor-first matching, and tracking matchmaking.
With these user goals in mind, as well as the takeaways of testing over a dozen low-fidelity concepts, we charged forth into detailed prototyping, starting with mid-fidelity mobile wireframes.
In talks with TPF’s IT department, we identified that a cloud-based web tool would be the best option, future-proofing our tool and allowing ease of access and updates. With responsive web as our decided platform, we followed mobile-first design best practices. The small screen real estate allowed us to focus on what information was essential; once we ensured that our tool’s content could fit comfortably on a smartphone screen, it would be much easier to scale up to Desktop.
However, even if the content fit, pulling our design into Desktop format presented us with a challenge of finding the perfect layout, especially knowing that Desktop would be the tool’s primary platform.
Internally, we had a power-hour of rapid exploration, critique, and iteration of low-fidelity desktop layouts in Figma, our collaborative online design software.
And even after agreeing on an overall layout, we continued to explore and gut-check variations of displaying the content, especially as we began to populate our prototype with realistic ‘dummy data.’ As we fleshed out the specific pages, we mapped out the information hierarchy of the system, aligning on what data would be shown on each screen.
And once we had our prototype in good shape, it was time to prepare for think aloud tests with the Donor Services Officers (DSOs) at The Pittsburgh Foundation! We created theoretical scenarios and tasks for the DSOs, to provide them with context and motivation as they dived into our matchmaking prototype and shared their thought processes.
Example scenario: You have an upcoming annual philanthropic review with your donor, Delilah Wu, and you want to see if any grants would be good to recommend, to demonstrate both your knowledge of Delilah’s interests and TPF’s expertise in local organizations. Try identifying the philanthropic interest that Delilah is most passionate about, finding recommended grants that fit that interest, and choosing one grant to share with Delilah.
We ran our think aloud test with all of the DSOs at The Pittsburgh Foundation, and the results were incredibly helpful and validating. Seeing DSO participants actually use our tool and hearing their unfiltered thoughts allowed us to both understand the intuitiveness of our design and to see firsthand how our tool can amplify their decision-making process.
Here are some highlights from participants during our tests:
“I think this will transform the way that we are able to connect nonprofits to donors.”
“You’ve somehow managed — I really don’t know how you did this — to fit a lot of information on the screen, but it’s not overwhelming. And it’s still very clean and easy to look at and navigate through.”
“That’s awesome, so it matches on both the donor side and the grant side… Incredible!”
Post-testing, our team synthesized our findings (both from what we heard and from what we saw) and identified some key takeaways:
- Donor-first matching, as opposed to grant-first matching, was more intuitive and resonated more with our participants.
- Participants valued the ability to manipulate the donors and grants lists, but there was confusion between whether they wanted to sort or filter; to address this, we plan to combine sort and filter functions onto one modal.
- We learned that the number of grants DSOs send vary depending on the donor, and sometimes they may want to save a grant for later; to address both of these needs, we will be incorporating a feature that allows DSOs to bookmark grants for certain donors, to export as a bundle or simply earmark for later.
And as we were finalizing our prototypes, we also finally arrived at a name for our matchmaking product: ReMatch!
We’re excited to share ReMatch’s final high-fidelity look and detailed functionality with the world shortly. Here’s just a preview of the work-in-progress final design.
Before we know it, we’ll have delivered our final presentation to our The Pittsburgh Foundation team and handed off ReMatch’s development package. But before our project comes to a close, we’ll be sure to serve up one last Medium post that walks through our finalized design and caps off our Capstone. ’Til then!
“There’s a world of difference between insisting on someone’s doing something and establishing an atmosphere in which that person can grow into wanting to do it.”
-Fred Rogers
