Upon receiving the project, the first thing I did was to mockup the concept the team had at the moment rapidly. The visualization allowed the team to have more effective discussions on the details and moved us closer to having discovery calls with clients. At the same time, to acquaint myself with the subject matter, I started looking at other solutions on the market to have a better idea of the competitive landscape from a ux perspective.

But how were marketers using these solutions in real life? While the exemplars provided me great insights on functionality & usability, it was essential for me to have some basic understandings of more use cases specific to NPOs, so that we can have a more effective conversation with clients later. To expand my knowledge on how admins at non-profit organizations might and wish to utilize this marketing channel, I perused guides, best practices, user stories / reviews on other products and synthesized the findings as below.

Going into the discovery calls, some primary goals me and the PM intern settled on were to understand how the admins create, manage, and evaluate their marketing campaigns right now, especially within what contexts these campaigns were for.

Due to the limited timeframe and resources, it was impossible for us to have that broad & exhaustive exploration we had hoped for. Therefore, we had to strategically narrow down our focuses to something that we recognized would benefit the project and our users the most in the long term to contribute our time and efforts. We ended up constraining ourselves to the workflow of creating the marketing contents and providing a way for admins to have a more personal interaction with constituents through this marketing channel. Below is the breakdown of how and why the decision was made.

While we had great insights from the discovery calls with clients, it was also the part I found most challenging throughout the process. For it being a project in such early discovery stage, there were limitations on reaching out to users and multiple concerns during the calls. With certain sessions, it was difficult finding a balance between drilling into specific details and getting more user knowledge on the subject matter. In retrospect, maybe the mockups presented to the client was too high-fidelity for our purpose, and I should have left some details that weren’t relevant at the time out.

After 5 weeks of exploration and iterations, the final deliverables I had for this project were mockups with user flows, inVision prototype, and a slidedeck documenting my process including analysis of competitive landscape, project scope and use cases. The project received positive reactions from both the UX and PM team, and was regarded as a good foundation for the product development in the long term. It also sparked discussions internally on accelerating it on the product roadmap by the end of the internship.

Planning & Adapting

The first thing I realized early on going into the internship was the significance of planning ahead. Going into a session with a clear goal and a plan, but at the same having the ability of adapting that plan according to the situation was key to the success of any meetings.

Knowing what I knew, what I didn’t know, what I was supposed to know, and how to know them was the probably the second most important lesson I had throughout the summer. Especially when a lot of the design work I had was to adapt existing patterns and system to a new design space.

It Goes beyond UX

Learning about things beyond UX was also extremely valuable for me in terms of understanding where the products stand and were perceived by the customers. Each product is and should be a collective effort from users, team members and different departments. Empathy and understanding does not only apply to our interaction with the users. Knowing how and why colleagues have different concerns over the product and how we as designers take those into considerations is definitely a part of the design process, too.