Solo research project
User experience, visual design, data visualization
June 2021
Design challenge
Product Designer
UX design, UI design, Data visualization, Product building
2021
Walmart and the Walmart Foundation generally provide more than $1 billion in cash and in-kind to support programs that align with our philanthropic priorities. They strive to systematically address some of the biggest economic, environmental, and social challenges faced in the world today. But they can’t do it alone. They work closely with our grantees to address large-scale environmental and social challenges.
Walmart has enabled Grantees (NGOs, Volunteers, Social Workers, etc.) to submit their donation requests with their purpose and needs. They get their grants reviewed and approved by our business team.
Sarah is a manager at the Walmart business team, responsible for:
1. Review and approve the donation requests
2. Manage and allocate the donation budget
3. Generate reports
Design a digital product to help Sarah manage her responsibilities efficiently.
The user - Sarah is a manager at Walmart business team. The main need we’re addressing with this product is to enable how effectively Sarah can manage her work. To do that, I believe these are the solutions the product should be addressing following needs:
Since Sarah is a business professional, most of her working time would be spent at the computer, hence I believe the core digital product should be a web app. It would help her provide the best experience to manage her work and responsibilities more effectively.
This app should also provide a mobile experience, in case she has any field work like meetings, and might need to be updated on the grantees profiles and requests on the go, owing to business needs.
Assumption: Since there is no unit measurement for goods and storage, the total budget includes money, goods, and storage spaces cumulatively.
Running a user test on the app design and understanding how Sarah performs the main actions would help us measure the success critically. Since the application will affect the key metrics of the product as a whole, so business KPIs and Sarah’s performance would be useful for measuring its success. Some critical success factors could be measured by -
Effort and satisfaction - Sarah should be able satisfied can be measured for approving grants and accessing their profiles
Time on task - Average time taken for Sarah to approve the eligible grants
This approach helped me breakdown the possible user journey, user flows and requirement gathering for all use cases. With the help of storyboards, I started thinking about what content I could provide to assist the Sarah during her work management and identify possible edge cases.
The dashboard would the main entry point to the app and I believe it has 2 main goals:
The informational goal could be achieved by fulfilling Sarah’s needs we discovered earlier:
How should Sarah manage the donation requests? - Providing an overall view of requests
How would Sarah understand more about the grantees requests and their background? - Providing a overall review of applicants profiles
What can Sarah do to make sure grants (money, goods and storage spaces) are distributed effectively within the budget? - Providing a budget distribution system
How can she easily generate donation reports? - Providing a quick tool to export reports
How can she see overview of allocations geographically? - Showing map allocations view
Identification the structure of all the content/information. Once I was clear about the ideas and what direction I wanted to take, I could structure the information of the platform simply.
I created digital wireframes before creating final design solutions.
This helped me to gauge how much space will need to be allocated for each feature, connect the site’s information architecture to its visual design, and clarify the page’s functionality.
Visual design components for the dashboard solution -
The home dashboard design provides -
Hypothesis: A more structured content display would help Sarah view the information more easily.
Metric: This would help in activation of quick access to requests and required actions.
The requests overview focuses on sharing requests. To structure the content more simply, I chose a tabular view to run through the requests. Additionally, there is sorting on rows and filter views by location and time-span.
Hypothesis: Sarah can run through the requests more easily, click on any request to view more details on individual request to be able to approve or reject them.
Metric: This would help Sarah in efficiently reviewing the donation requests and generate quick report.
The requests details page displays the breakdown details that the an applicant inputs while creating a request in a form format.
Hypothesis & Metrics: This view would let Sarah to approve or deny the requests very easily while letting her view the overall request details, enabling overall satisfaction & reduced effort.
The reporting details page displays options for different reporting data. For visibility I have put them in different visualisation data models, they can also be seen in list view via filters.
Hypothesis & Metrics: This helps in generating reports on various data, and also gives an overview of data analytics.
