📌 Project Context
What is Salesforce Philanthropy Cloud?
Philanthropy Cloud provides a platform to help:
Employees find an easy way to donate and volunteer with causes they are passionate about.
Companies to optimize their corporate social responsibility programs.
Nonprofits to expand their donor and volunteer networks.
Philanthropy Cloud was created in partnership with United Way to combine the technology and innovation of Salesforce with the service and expertise of the world’s leader in corporate philanthropy.
Supported Platforms: Desktop iOS, and Android.
👩🏻💻 My Role, The Beginning
In October 2019, I was hired to join the design team at Salesforce.org. After spending a few weeks with the team, I gained a deep understanding of the product's functions and suggested several improvements to enhance the overall user experience:
Enhance the UI to ensure a consistent and natural experience across platforms (Desktop, iOS and Android)
Improve design system efficiency and promote visual and functional consistency to reduce building time and to encourage innovation.
Make sure accessibility standards across platforms are met and design or enhance the product based on Salesforce's values of inclusion and equality.
After meeting with PM's from each platform the team decided to implement these suggestions and product enhancements were completed successfully. After working in this role for six months, I was promoted to Lead UX Designer for the Mobile Platform.
🤓 The Design Challenge
In my new role as Lead UX Designer, I was responsible for designing solutions for high-demand features that had been requested by stakeholders.
Sign up for a Volunteer Opportunity & Add to Calendar - iOS and Android
Social Visibility - iOS and Android
Search Experience - iOS and Android
👩🏻🦰 Phase 1: Empathize
I recognized the importance of understanding the different types of user personas, user journeys, and user pain points. To gather the necessary information, I partner with the research team and we conducted a series of workshops, knowledge transfer sessions, and customer interviews.
Through these efforts, we were able to gather a comprehensive understanding of our users' needs and preferences, which allowed us to move forward with the design process with confidence.
User Personas Summary.
User Pain Points identified through interview sessions.
🌟 Key Findings
During one of our interview sessions with donors/volunteers, we asked an important question:
What is a capability Philanthropy Cloud should have to help you achieve your goals?
They provided a range of different responses to our question, reflecting the diversity of perspectives and experiences among our user base. By listening carefully to their feedback and taking their perspectives into account, we were able to gain a deeper understanding of their needs and priorities.
Add to calendar: To make it easier for volunteers to keep track of their commitments and manage their schedules.
Discovery/tracking: Of social impact experiences - to empower volunteers to find opportunities that match their interests and skills.
Auto-logging of volunteer hours: To streamline the process of tracking and reporting on volunteer activities.
Personalized recommendations: Based on the volunteer activities.
Community/Engagement: Display of ongoing activities of friends, family, and colleagues to inspire/motivate collaboration among volunteers.
Highlight specific initiatives: To help volunteers make meaningful connections with other professionals in their field.
Attendee Information: To provide volunteers with the information they need to make the most of their event experience, including information about who else will be attending, their status (signed up, check-in, cancelled), and other relevant details.
Integration with other native apps: Like maps, weather, and clock apps - to help volunteers get to their events on time and in a stress-free way. This includes providing directions, suggested departure times, and alarm setting capabilities.
🎯 Phase 2: Define
Although we had previously received the information of the necessary features, during the research phase, we confirmed our assumptions and identified several additional improvements requested by the users. As a team, we recognized the importance of identifying the users' genuine needs to provide the most effective solutions. We understood that our users had many requests, but it was essential to distinguish between their needs/wants and business requirements.
During a team meeting, we discussed these findings and agreed that any potential new features should be tested and observed in user testing sessions before being implemented. We also divided our findings into three categories:
First requests/Product Value: By aligning stakeholder requests with our research findings, we were able to deliver valuable features that met our users' and business needs.
Urgent Needs: Related to core functionalities that allow users to accomplish core tasks, these were identified during research stage. Essential to the app's primary functionality.
Future App Enhancements: Opportunities for improvement that could be implemented in future releases.
✍🏼 Summary
1️⃣ First requests/Product Value
Sign up for a Volunteer Opportunity & Add to Calendar - iOS and Android
Social Visibility - iOS and Android
Search Experience - iOS and Android
Search Experience: According to research, donors found the search experience overwhelming. With over 1.5 million charitable causes and organizations to choose from, finding the right one requires a significant amount of work and effort.
2️⃣ Urgent Needs
Enhance Content Details Page
Add volunteer opportunity address and integration with native map app.
Display user skills that matched the volunteer opportunity.
Provide "Add to Calendar" capability for volunteer opportunities.
3️⃣ Future App Enhancements
Provide the distance between the user's address and the location of the volunteer opportunity.
Create integration with weather and clock app to provide suggested time of departure, notifications and alarm settings.
🌠 Stage 3: Ideate
I worked in a highly collaborative environment where I presented my design solutions to a team of six senior designers on a weekly basis. These feedback sessions were invaluable for identifying gaps and areas for improvement in my designs, and allowed me to iterate quickly and efficiently to arrive at the best possible solutions.
🎨 Stage 4 & 5: Prototype & Test
I translated the refined ideas from the earlier stages into testable prototypes. The prototypes allowed us to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed solutions and to identify any potential issues or areas for improvement. Here are the final outcomes for the following flows:
🔍 Search Experience:
Filters added ✅
Search results UI improved ✅
Added suggestions while typing ✅
Final Design, Search Filters.
Design Anatomy
Description of UI elements.
Description of UI elements.
Description of UI elements.
📆 Volunteer Opportunities:
Sign up flow ✅
Add to calendar functionality ✅
Social Visibility ✅
Final Design, Sign up to a Volunteer Opportunity [Multiple Shifts].
Design Anatomy
Description of UI elements.
Description of UI elements.
Final Design, Social Visibility on Volunteer Pages.
Design Anatomy
Description of UI elements.
Description of UI elements.
👩🏻🏫 Phase 6: Handoff & Monitor
Description of UI elements.
Example of UI corrections sent to front-end engineers during development process.
🛠️ Design Software
⛰️ Conclusions
Collaboration is crucial to success in the UX field and it's one of my favorite aspects of the design process. Including the entire team (designers, developers, project managers, etc.) provides diverse perspectives and valuable insights that ultimately improve the final outcome.
Collaboration also involves receiving and giving feedback. As a team, we held weekly meetings where we presented our current work and provided feedback to each other. My colleagues helped me refine my ideas, challenged me to think outside the box, and explore alternative solutions. Their contributions were instrumental in the success of the project.
More information about this project can be found in the following links:
Philanthropy Cloud Desktop Website | Credentials needed.
Announcing the Salesforce.org Philanthropy Mobile App | First release, Oct 2019.