UCLA My Giving Gateway
Skills
UCLA My Giving Gateway is an online portal that allows donors to view their contributions to the university and print receipts for tax purposes. The primary goal of the project was to reduce the volume of customer support calls received by the Donor Relations department regarding donor gift statements. I began the project by collaborating with the Donor Relations team to gather feedback on common issues and questions donors have encountered when managing their gifts. After collecting this initial input, I conducted qualitative research to identify the features donors would find most valuable in the new system. Working alongside the Business Analyst, I facilitated interviews with a mix of donors and representatives from the Donor Relations team to ensure the research captured perspectives from both user and support staff.
From the findings, here are some key takeaways:
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Donors want the ability to generate and print gift reports directly from the application for tax purposes.
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Some major donors prefer to have others manage their gifts, creating a need for guest access.
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Donors want to track whether and when their gifts have been distributed.
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Administrators aim to reduce or eliminate the need to send physical gift receipts at the end of the year by providing online access.
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Administrators also want to decrease the volume of phone calls regarding donor inquiries about the status of their gifts.
Along with the BA, I started with creating user flows for each key phases: Registration, Account Creation, Enter Dashboard, View Giving History, Edit Personal Info and Contact Us. Next is to run them by development team, and get sign off. Then I created wireframes based on the approved user flows.
Next step is to identify key phases and created hi-fidelity mockups with Sketh and uploaded to Invision to create clickable prototype. Then from there, I invited back the same participants from the research to do usability test in which they were asked to perform a set of tasks on the mockups to validate/invalidate my assumptions/hypothesis. I had to go a few round of iterations based on their feedback before going to the development.
The final step was to hand off all mockups to the development team. I prepared a comprehensive style guide, including graphic assets and H1–H6 typography specifications, and uploaded all design mockups and assets to InVision, along with detailed functional specifications through developer notes. At the end of the development cycle, we conducted a User Acceptance Testing (UAT) to ensure that each feature met the acceptance criteria. Once the system was launched, we implemented Google Analytics to monitor performance and gather user feedback, which will inform improvements and guide the next round of releases.
