I am Fred

Assessing the state of affairs

Prior to this initiative, nonprofit clients were essentially given a data dump inside a Looker skin. What was originally intended as a temporary way to provide information escalated into an interface of 8 tabs and 14 tables (with some tables up to 27 columns) encompassing information from 5 products, and a page load time of nearly 10 seconds.

A range of redundancies, inconsistencies, and information irrelevancies resulted in frequent client confusion and misconceptions regarding the data. A significant amount of post-export work was also required for clients to make use of the data.

A new conceptual framework

We conducted research to develop an understanding of how nonprofit officers perceive gifts and donors, how data are actually used, and the nature of their teams’ relationship with our platform.

From that, we created a new conceptual framework that would set portal up to become the nexus of where major relationships come to be nurtured.

Work, tactics, and details

Then we began the meticulous work of detailing the transformations necessary to have everything coalesce under the new model, as well as designing and building the new supporting system itself.

Because of the importance and delicateness of the data we were working with, and our desire to avoid disrupting clients with existing processes, we decided to build the new system and its features in parallel to the existing product, in lieu of updating it or replacing it immediately.

We renamed the old portal to “Portal Classic” and communicated plans to eventually sunset it. Now, we’d be able to ensure stability and accuracy in the new system, unencumbered by architectural debt, and iteratively push features into a controlled environment before widespread release.

New system, new possibilities

The new system, designed to be technically extensible as well as more closely aligned with the nonprofit mental model, opened the door for us to couple a large migration effort with tangible features that had previously been too costly to build.

From this effort alone, we achieved:

• Consolidated, consistent, cleaner data views
• EXTRA WIN: Improved load times (5x)
• EXTRA WIN: Gift statuses
• EXTRA WIN: Gift commenting
• EXTRA WIN: Gift histories & activity
• EXTRA WIN: 360 contact views

Of particular note was a new foundational focus on the donor as a meaningful human relationship instead of simply a giver of gifts. This underlying principle would allow us to naturally bring together other business areas to create a more cohesive product vision.

The new partner portal was quickly met with high enthusiasm and gratitude from our clients, many of which reported their own improvements to efficiency and process. Although extremely valuable from the get-go, the new system and framework, both philosophical and technical, promises to be just the start of how the portal can and will evolve.

Reducing uncertainty in a time of grieving

Estate planning consists of documents that detail one’s wishes in the event of incapacity or death. In case of death, funeral arrangements must be made, children and pets may be looked after, and assets must be distributed.

While residents of most states can manage the distribution of their estate using a Last Will & Testament, Californians are advised to use Revocable Living Trusts due to the state’s lengthy probate process.

Acknowledging practical limits

Legal provisions for estate plans can theoretically be as complex or particular as a client desires, so long as they are enforceable and legally compliant.

This means that while we should support estate planners with specific desires and circumstances as much as possible, software could never practically achieve the level of customization that counsel can provide.

Design and feature choices, therefore, must be carefully decided based on case likelihood, maintainability, and legal jurisprudence and practice.

Designing for and within the law

Unlike digital experiences that may encourage users to perform specific behaviors, software that results in legal document output faces the challenge and existential risk of running into the unauthorized practice of law.

For the sake of users, interactions and information must be simple and clear, but not at the expense of accuracy, which at times meant acknowledging the necessity for legalese. Meanwhile, recommendations must be tread carefully, with areas of particular sensitivity defaulted to safety, supplemented with warnings and encouragement to seek qualified counsel.

Real people, real stories

Estate planning is something that everyone will eventually have to face, and ensuring its broad access regardless of circumstances is one of the greatest prides we take in our product and business model.

Seeing the stories of those who have used our product helps us understand just how important the work we’ve done and are doing is.

Room for improvement
(pun intended)

The company was in the business of short/medium-haul relocation (ie: helping people move their belongings to new homes). A problem identified was that vehicles being deployed would often times be too big or too small, resulting in customer frustration or wasted space.

The way the company was currently getting data to inform their process was via user-submitted forms. While there were likely ways to improve the accuracy of these inputs, there was an appetite to see if there could be a technological boost to the process.

Based on resources at the time, we wondered if we could leverage something most people in the target market already had and were familiar with using — smartphones, with native cameras and gyroscopes.

Could it work?

The first step was to see if there was any feasibility to the idea, assuming that smartphones would reliably return accurate gyroscopic data, and users would correctly handle a theoretical mobile application.

To assess this, I laid out the mathematical premise of using a phone’s orientation information alongside camera targeting to simulate basic positioning cases.

How would it work?

We were cautiously optimistic to find that the calculations required seemed relatively straightforward. Before going too deep into fleshing out the cases and computations, the next step was to see how this would translate into a practical application, and risks involved.

Could the application be reliably used in a self-directed manner? What would be its the margin of error? What factors would influence this and could they be corrected for? How much of an improvement in operations could we actually expect?

Pragmatism in the face of circumstances

While we discovered promising answers to some of those questions, critical unknowns and a re-evaluation of company challenges led us to concede that investment in developing a measurement application at the time would likely outweigh its potential benefit.

Though this concept did not see its way toward implementation during my time — the early exploration was a valuable endeavor to understand possibilities and use cases, and the decision to halt illustrated the importance of good judgment in the face of other company concerns.

Play as meditation

I began this project as a protest against too many games with flashy graphics and overused motifs.

I wanted to create something that could turn play into a sort of meditation — minimalist and sedative, based on whimsical interactions and muted mechanics.

Rediscovering the ordinary

Drawing inspiration first from popular houseplants, I decided that it would be fun and familiar to take after the relationships that we and other organisms have with these delightful forms of life.

Seen and unseen

A great experience doesn‘t strive for “minimally viable” — it strives for what is excellent.

Subtleties and small details ensure that delights are not just those that can be readily witnessed, but felt.

I wanted to spend the extra effort fiddling with satisfying movements and interesting computations. From decelerative reactions to inputs to random seed-based parametric path generation, it was important to me that what went on behind the scenes was as deliberate and considered as what was in front.