COMMUNITY
A place for organizers to connect with people emotionally.
Gofundme
YEARROLECONTRIBUTIONCOMPANY2020Lead product Designer & Brand designerUX・Visual・Brand・ ResearchOVERVIEW
About 72% of fundraisers on GoFundMe are for funerals, memorials, or medical needs. These situations can be very emotionally tough, and asking for help is often the hardest part of starting a fundraiser. People have questions about their stories and need support to share them. Our product encourages sharing, and our customer experience team helps with storytelling. However, we find it challenging to address the emotional aspect. This project aims to create a space for people to connect with others who have faced similar challenges, providing a place for support.
THE PROBLEM
Building connections among vulnerable individuals is challenging. How can you encourage them to discuss their feelings and situations? Can your product help people connect without turning it into a donation request platform?
We aimed to prevent users from simply asking for donations, which often leads to individuals needing to reveal more about their struggles to maintain hope. Our social media often receives many donation requests, and we wanted to avoid that on our messaging platform. Users faced challenges in knowing how to ask for help, and many lacked contacts who had succeeded in this. The project's focus is to teach people how to use the community effectively while ensuring they receive the support they need.
GOAL
Create an active community
The best kind of community is one that has members that are active and interacting with others. Fostering conversations and trying to get people who have been successful on GoFundMe (not just people looking for advice) was a major goal for this project.
Incorporate advice from GoFundMe Heroes
Seeing success on GoFundMe from other users is often times the easiest way to give people confidence in starting their fundraiser. But sometimes it can be misleading that their fundraiser will also go viral and raise thousands of dollars in a matter of minutes. Our featured GoFundMe Heroes volunteered their time to help us with this challenge.
Surface relevant topics of conversation
We need to avoid the spamming messages asking for donations but didn’t want to discourage people from coming to the community. We needed to understand the core of of why people couldn’t get donations - was it their story? Was it the way they shared their fundraiser?
MY ROLE
LO-FI EXPLORATIONSStrategized the hierarchy of the page, creating lo-fidelity wireframes and hi-fidelity mockups to conceptualize the interactions for users (pages included: landing page, discussion page, category page, sign-up/sign-in, creating a profile, post page)
Worked with the development company to integrate the designs into their system, using Vanilla and then integrating it into a new hosted platform, Insided
Created brand assets for badges, avatars, category cards, and hero image illustrations
Collaborated closely with VIP and marketing for launch and met with other parts of the product to add entry points to the Community
Completed design QA once Vanilla completed their customization piece and provided feedback on future iterations
DESIGN QA & FEEDBACK