FLUXX.IO
Client Project
Project
Fluxx.io is a comprehensive grants management platform. It’s a powerful product that serves some of the largest foundations in the world. Fluxx wanted to create a SaaS model of the existing product in order to serve the needs of smaller foundations, that require less customization.
My Role
Project Lead
Stakeholder interviews and workshop facilitation
User Research (recruitment, scheduling, discussion guide, conducting interviews)
Persona
User Stories
Sketch-boarding to consolidate our knowledge and share direction with the client
User Flows
Screen Design
Final deliverable: Interactive Prototype
PROCESS
1. Discovery
We conducted stakeholder interviews to find out the pain points for the company and current users (via customer care feedback). From this we were able to frame our thinking about the SaaS product from the point of view of the client and identify 15 areas that caused them and their users concern.
Dump and sort from stakeholder workshop to identify pain points with current system for users and staff.
2x2 organizing pain points, by 'pain' and who it effects - users or staff.
Next, we created a hypothetical persona for the target user and set about recruiting foundation staff that fitted in the persona. We conducted generative interviews, which helped us learn about the internal processes of different foundations and the current tools they use to get the job done.
Discussion guide for generative user interviews, using a technique from Luxr.
Dump and sort for user interview insights to identify patterns.
2. Ideation and Design
Using the insights we gathered from our user interviews we updated our persona and brought all our thinking together in the form of a sketchboard. This made it easier for us to put all our ideas together and collaborate with the client to think about the design problem methodically.
Sketchboarding to explore, share and iterate on ideas, bringing all our thinking together into one space that we can roll up and take anywhere. Includes, problems and constraints, personas, user processes and research findings.
Updated Persona
Based on the sketchboard, we were about to pull out the key user tasks and stories and create a simplified user flow. During the workshop we discovered that a reductionist approach wasn't right for this work, and it was more productive for us to think about the user flow from scratch, stripping things down to the basics. We then held a workshop with the client to gather feedback, deepen our understanding and find areas that required further exploration.
Simplified user flow based from what we learned from sketchboarding.
Annotated user Flows, during client workshop.
We took that round of feedback and decided on next steps - investigating some of the problem areas identified and the client's riskiest assumptions through some additional targeted interviews with the potential user group; and creating a prototype that would explain our direction to the client and be suitable for validating with users. We started with interface sketches, referring back to the user flow and user stories we created.
As a final deliverable we created a 'vision' video/prototype to explain the simplified product concept to the client, which they could validate with their target user group. It provided a new way of thinking about grants management that the client used to influence their product development.
Many thanks to my awesome team mates: Jordan Presnick, Michael Sun and Roy Chan