cubby

My role was designing our mobile website's user experience and interface. I shared research and analysis responsibilities with my co-founding team members, Jeanette Andrews and Ahana Ganguly.

Jeanette is a software engineer and data scientist who developed our website and whom I collaborated with to decided our most viable product. Ahana is a writer who served as our content designer/user experience writer.

All three of us held executive leadership over the organization and served as Cubby artists, providing us with first-hand knowledge of Cubby's operations and shareholders.

problem discovery

Cubby was born on social media. Thriving on social media to market, communicate, and provide relevant resources to order and learn more, we eventually found that we needed a more flexible platform as our customer base quickly grew.

By the second month of operating Cubby's fund, we’d seen such a rapid increase in weekly orders that it became clear that change was necessary. The increase in traffic came with an increase in production, troubleshooting, and customer support, making it challenging for us to run our fund smoothly and satisfying our shareholders.

measurable goals

1. Decrease in custom support needed without losing donation quantity or funds raised
2. Better conversion from interested, curious donor to high-paying donor

Meeting these goals was vital in ensuring we continuously raised enough funds to fulfill the organization's main service. Satisfying customers (donors) was critical to maintaining order quantity and a predictable stream of incoming funds.

constraints

analysis

We were fortunate at this stage because we’d developed relationships with all of our reoccurring donors, directly communicated with dozens of potential ones, and had access to Instagram’s insights for business pages to see what resources we were currently offering were being viewed, utilized, and ignored. We also received demographics information regarding gender, age, and location.

Alongside real-life data, we had ideas of who we wanted to target:

From all commentary received, we discovered 3 insights:

usage and platform

We used Instagram features such as the bio, highlights, and posts to share important information. Additionally, our order form where we ask where donors found us, we understood that we were dependent on inbound marketing through social media.

However, we discovered in conversations with followers that having a one-stop-shop for all information and share-ability outside of social media was critical in being able to reach a wider set of donors. For example, sending the order form to a parent who doesn't use Instagram.

We knew we wanted a solution that didn't take away from how Instagram-based potential donors (friends who saw a friend's post about their own doodle, someone who randomly found our account) interacted with us, but needed a resource that could be more widely shared by word-of-mouth, text, email, other social media, etc.

People could share our order form (a Google Form) with friends and family, but that didn't allow the receiver to know much information about Cubby.

1. Social media posts promoting Cubby found us roughly 82% of new donors, and
2. About 11% were referred by a friend by word of mouth

Though we provided multiple places for people to find information about how to order, how we work, how to pay, etc., we still received many direct messages asking us a variety of questions.

pain points

At this point, many of these challenges arose because we didn’t have a good place to share all essential information.

We were able to design a  website that provided valuable information for both donors and fund recipients (current or potential) about how we work.

We used a Linktree for a short amount of time, but were able to easily develop a site with more flexibility and features. We also conducted a “competitive analysis” on similar efforts and noticed inefficiencies in their use of “link in bio” or “highlights” to provide clear information and transparency, such as a lack of information or a hard-to-navigate set of screenshots to share lots of information.

Because most potential donors were social media users, I designed a mobile site that would be accessed from the Instagram profile's bio section. This would serve to provide the following key features:

1. Order form
2. Informational pages: receipts, our story, where we donate, how it works
3. Our styles

user interface

Our Instagram insights provided us with more detailed information about our followers, such as age, gender, location. This influenced us mostly in designing for the 23-30 year age group in mind.

design solutions

tradeoffs

• Not having a "[Name] just donated!" banner, as many fundraising sites have – we wanted to maintain a brand identity that wasn't over developed, funded, or commodified
• Testimonials – though this is common practice in fundraising, to show pictures and stories of who funds end up supporting, we learned in our relationships with fund recipients that their privacy was important, and we wanted to respect who we were serving
• Ability to choose where your funds go – this wasn't feasible for our small fund, given we wanted to be equitable in our redistribution

outsourcing tech components

Instead of developing or integrating in-page features for everything, we relied on existing tools so that we could focus on the most necessary feature of our website that improved users' experience in order to gain orders. This also ensured that migrating to a website would be simple and easy for return donors. These tools also provided our team with efficient ways to streamline our operations.

rejected ideas

1. Developing our own order form, payment form, and chatting feature – this would be an unnecessary use of resources and extend time until launch
2. Promoting doodles over cause – though this would likely not decrease orders because most completed order forms were incentivized by interest in the doodle, we put thought into the long-term impact on our donors and donation recipients if we over-commodify our services and disregard larger mission
3. Linktree – this discouraged users from exploring pages other than our order form because we could not create a homepage which may cause confusion or not educate customers who may be unaware of Cubby's overall goals

iterations

Overtime, we expanded to offer more resources and pages. The simplistic navigation allowed us to continuously add any necessary pages and design each to their individual uses while sticking to a small design system.

user testing

Though we didn't have the capabilities to conduct formal user testing, we did see that our main problem: direct messages asking for ordering support + incomplete orders, did disappear almost entirely.

Additionally, we received positive feedback from users about the changes we'd made in response to their pain points thanking us for such changes and resources.

‍

As Cubby saw multiple phases in providing space to order a doodle, the integration of this mobile website on its social media profile improved donation averages: from $18 per doodle to $38, and weekly orders stayed consistent and predictable.

The impact of this over the next 7 months raised $21,185 which was redistributed to 40+ BIPoC individuals seeking funds for tuition, housing, healthcare, education, and career prep in sets between $500 and $2,000.