Friends of Duncan Library's Giving Dashboard
A responsive website to help manage donations & relationships.
Role: UX Researcher/UX Designer
Goal: Develop a nonprofit dashboard
Tools: Figma, UXTweak, Miro
Overview
Friends of Duncan Library (FoDL) supplements the library’s city-supported budget. FoDL raises funds primarily through membership campaigns and book sales.
The Problem: FoDL needs a tool to help manage supporter relationships. Users need to easily add new members at fundraisers, thank donors, and accurately forecast funding.
The Solution: A responsive dashboard that enables FoDL board members to easily keep supporter information up to date and track trends in sales and memberships.
My process is simple and methodical.
I followed up on competitive analysis by talking with actual board members to identify their pain points and goals.
Then, I gathered and synthesized the data into actionable insights that informed the next stage of the process.
Customer Research Results
I researched dashboards designed to serve small nonprofits to identify competitor systems and their capabilities.
Users complained about complex reporting, lengthy onboarding, confusing donor tracking, and clunky integrations.
I also talked to 5 adults who volunteer for small nonprofits, three of whom were from FoDL. I asked them about how they track memberships, donations, and supporters and what pain points they experience in the process.
My Findings
Synthesis
I uploaded the data gathered from user interviews into Miro and began looking for common themes.
From the themes I gathered, I observed the following:
FoDL needs a way to track member interactions, deliver on membership, and learn who members are.
Key functionalities are shareability; automatic reminders; tracking relationships & money.
User Personas and Points of View
Alma and Justina were inspired by aspects of the people I interviewed: nonprofit board members and volunteers who need to track people in order to deliver member benefits and track fundraising dollars.
Question: How might we help FoDL board members update supporter records in a more efficient way? And how might we help FoDL board members easily see trends in their sales and memberships?
Answer: Through a dashboard that helps FoDL board members track trends and update supporter records. Features include a supporter list, supporter tagging, filters, and a report generator.
Task Flows
I thought through how a dashboard to track and manage library supporters would work. As a starting point, I thought through how a user might accomplish the main tasks of the website (updating a supporter record and running a report) and created task flows.
Initial Sketches and Wireframes
Figma Make's AI
I also used Figma Make to create a prototype of the Supporters page, to see how AI would design the same dashboard. The end result looks much like the wireframes I created prior to using Figma Make.
High-Fidelity Mock-Ups
The overall design was based on conventions of existing dashboards that I looked at during the competitive analysis stage.
I also designed mobile versions of the dashboard. I focused on adapting essential functions to a smaller screen by thinking about how users would use the website on the go.
Prototypes & Testing
In a low-fidelity usability study, 5 users completed both task flows quickly. Running a report confused users because the task flow did not match their mental model. Several tried to run a report through the Supporters Center.
The following were user-flagged issues and the resulting changes:
- Adopting clearer, more descriptive labeling.
- Making the edit button on the supporter page clearer.
- Varying supporter names in the “recent activity” sections.
After making these changes and applying the UI kit, I created high-fidelity prototypes for each task and retested them with participants.
Design Iterations
After synthesizing the research results and feedback, I made changes to both the desktop and mobile versions.
Changes included:
- On the Report Center: Adding functionalities, options, and a fly-out menu to standardize the table design; linked names to profiles.
- On the mobile and desktop homepages: Retitled “Campaign Center” “Fundraising” to avoid marketing jargon.
- On the Supporters Center: Added a redirect for people who went to the Supporters Center to run a report.
Conclusion
I learned to distill a nonprofit's technology needs into the most effective and cost-efficient solution. For FoDL, I created a dashboard to support member and donor relationships, and to track finances.
I also learned the importance of adapting the design to meet users’ mental models. I designed the wireframes based on existing dashboards, all of which had separate sections for running reports. What I didn’t realize was that users might navigate to the section of what they need to run a report on instead of the dedicated report section.
