GiveDirectly

Prompt

Avocademy: The web3 challenge.
How might we improve accessibility and education of web 3 projects?

Team

Daania Rao- Design and synthesize lead

Robin- Research lead

Duration

1 week

Tools

Figma

Project context

GiveDirectly was created during a designathon hosted by Avocademy. For 48 hours, my team designed a mobile app that aims to integrate donations seamlessly with individuals globally with the benefit of using web 3.0.

Make an international donation on GiveDirectly

The homepage showcases recommendations about a charitable projects started by individuals. Clicking on an initiative will allow them to view the original recommendation as well as timeline that the host is proposing.

Track where the donation funds are being spent

Through the tracking feature, donors can determine how and where their donated money is being spent. Here they have opportunity to either follow projects or track their transaction IDs.

Learn about the app and features through the onboarding flow

Once a user downloads the app they will go through a robust onboarding experience where they can learn all about web3 application.

1

First, get familiar with the world of web3

Having only been working in web 2 and having little to no knowledge, I started researching what web 3.0 is and how it contributes to the world. I set out to learn about how the general population is thinking about web3 with few research goals in my mind.

1. How much does the population truly understands web 3?

2. Does the regular population understand the benefits of the web 3?

3. Does the general population understand the connection between crypto and web3?

Research deep dive:

We reached out to multiple people through questionnaires given the time, to gauge their understanding of web3 and asked questions regarding web 3.

20 responses

72%

Little to no knowledge of web3

50%

Never heard of Dapp

90%

Doesn't understand connection between between web 3 and crypto

40%

Concerned about how it works and/or security

"Why should I trust Web 3? It feels like a scam to me" -Survey participant.

2

How and where could we use web3 to our advantage?

We wanted to find real-world causes where we could use web3 to our benefit. Through our secondary research, we learned that web3 would provide ownership of information and transparency in data while providing a secure system, the opportunity to generate innovative new projects with real value, and a tool for collaboration.

This is when we started to look into the world of philanthropy. Our assumption was that most philanthropists will get a huge benefit by using apps that are based on web3.

Understanding who our users would be

Again we used surveys as our research tool to understand the world of philanthropy and how individuals have worked in the field.

Key takeaways:

1. 100% of our participants have donated to local charities

Through our research, we learned that every individual living in first world country has donated one way or another to charitable causes within their lifetime.

2. 30% of our users have donated money to international charities

We also learned that only 30% of the population has donated to international or global charitable causes. They know the calamities and/or initiatives happening in the world yet are limited in knowledge of ways to help them.

Why don't individuals donate internationally?

1 / Corruption

Fears corruption in the process as individuals are not aware of the process.

2 / Lack of visibility to impact generated

Individuals feel blindsided when it comes to the impact created by their donations as they are miles away.

"I like to see where my money goes"

3 / Individuality

Many want to donate to individuals instead of big firms yet fear a lack of transparent communication and ways to build trust.

Key design opportunities started to arise

Through the synthesis of all the data that we gathered, I realized that philanthropists and donors were facing the same challenges but the inverse of each other.

Donors want to donate to a trustable individual to help them with a global initiative

.....while,

philanthropist wants to receive donations to help their small community hundreds of miles away.

Our main user

To further compile our research results, we created two users on the end-to-end journey of donor and individual philanthropist and to highlight common pain points we found.

Donor

Susan is a 28-year-old girl who likes to donate money to initiatives that help her community and similar global initiatives.

Scenario:

Lately, Susan has been hearing a lot about the clean water initiative. She starts reading about this initiative on multiple resources and wants to help people in her community and those in developing countries.

Painpoints

Frustrated with the lack of platforms that accept donations but use half of the donation towards their profits.
Fears corruption in the process.
Disappointed to have no visibility of what impact her donation has made.

Needs

Communication and visibility to what the individual has been spending money on.
She wants to feel more involved in the process to see her donation's impact.
Easy, accessible, and safe money transferable options.

Background

Has used go fund me and other platforms to donate money.

Philanthropist

Nathalia lives in one of the rural areas of Africa with her family. Her mother walks for four hours daily to get clean water for her family.

Scenario:
Nathalia wants to do something about access to clean water for her community yet lacks the resources. She reaches out to a local bank for a loan but gets a refusal as she doesn’t have any credit history or any funds to pay it back. She reaches out to the local community for donations but isn’t able to collect enough funds hence she reaches out to the global community in developing countries to help with her initiative.

Painpoints

Lack of funds to pay local laborers who will dig up to 15 meters by hand to reach aquifers below.
Losing money in the platform’s fees or hidden charges during international transactions.
Reducing processing time between multiple transactions.

Needs

She wants to build trust between her and donors by providing easy visibility.
She wants to receive funds instantly to pay workers on daily basis.
She wants a simple and intuitive solution to her problem.

Background

This is her first time working on an initiative and wants to set up good reputation for the future as her community is deprived of many resources.
For the future, she wants to build a reputable circle that could trust her on future initiatives.

The synthesis of research and developing a problem statement and primary users helped me hone in on the problem spaces I wanted to focus on. With each idea, I asked myself:

- does it address one of these key problem spaces?

- what are the resources required vs. the possible impact on success metrics?

- how risky is it? Is it worth the investment?

How might we add transparency and reliability to a donor's journey and individual philanthropist?

How to build users trust on the platform?

How to educate users about advantages of web3?

How can we build a platform that is accessible to all users?

Ideating features

Given the short timeline of designathon, we concentrated only on donor perspective and how the solution will provide assistance to donors.

Easy and accessible platform

We wanted to ensure our platform was easy for all ages irrespective of age or education. We designed our screens in a way that gave donors a chance to explore all global initiatives easily.

We used the advantage of crypto transfer on our app for quick funds transactions. Given how instant and fast the money transfer is, we thought it would help cut the transit time short.

Quick description of how much money is being raised for the initiative and how many individuals have contributed.

Short description of how the project will work, equipment needed, and who will be getting benefitted.

Timeline has been added for the project to provide visibility to donors.

Feedback and reassurance

As the web3 app is the latest technology, it will take some time for individuals to get on board with the idea and trust the platform that uses web3 technology. To build trust within our user base, we thought the platform to provide constant feedback to the users on all the next steps that users were taking.

Tracking of funds spending

Given the advantage of web3 blockchain technology, all users would benefit from the visibility of the payments being made by the host using their funds. This information will automatically be added to app whenever the donor chooses to make a payment or purchase anything. This will also help donors save time updating their accounts for donor visibility.

Provides two ways for users to follow the transferred funds: following the payments or following the timeline of causes.

A short receipt is added to the screen whenever a payment is made using funds.

If a user is following any cause, they donated to, they can review what advancements are being made in the project.

A detailed interactive way on where the fund was used per the project timeline.

Educating users about web3 and app

Providing an interactive onboarding experience where users get educated about features of the application and how we are utilizing web3 in our solution.

Testing and improvements

We tested our wireframes and flow with three users to get basic guidance on MVP. Based on the feedback from our users we implemented some changes on our screens.

Addition of trustable circle feature:

We added a trustable circle feature to build a sense of community that helped users build empathy. As the contributions were being done by anonymous accounts, this feature brought forward compassion within individuals who had donated to the cause.

Continuous education of all web3 benefits:

Users still complained about feeling uninformed about some of the critical aspects of the app. To make the platform more informative about web3, we added some sub-copy to a couple of our sections explaining the feature in detail. In addition, we provided more security features in our app to build trust within our user base.

Adding sub-copy about privacy and security:

Additional security step for facial ID verification.

Providing visibility to conversion rate per users currency. Building familiarity between real and digital world.

Updating descriptions for user identification:

Account numbers and transaction IDs were rephrased to nicknames assigned by users to make the interface more relatable and easy to read and retain.

Next steps

1 / Test hi-fidelity designs with users

To understand if our solution truly works with users, we should test the flow of screens to see if any problems are coming through.

2 / Build interface for philanthropist

We would begin to work on the philanthropist side of the app where they could set up initiatives and receive funds on their end.

3 / Conduct more competitive research

This might be a step backward, but given shrunken time, we could not research competitive space and learn how other apps have been successfully running dapps.