Giving made delightfully easy
In the spring of 2019, Betaworks introduced me to a young startup that was working on something interesting – the Momentum team wanted to make giving fun and accessible to a new generation.
I flew to Oakland to work with the team for a month long intensive. Within the span of a month we took the app from a bare bones app to a real product.
Four months later I did a second stint with the team, this time we developed a illustration style for the app and I produced all the illustrations in the span of three weeks.
Team
Product Manager: Ari Kagan
Product Design: Myself, Ari Kagan, Ryan Conlan
Identity and visual design: Hookooekoo
Product Illustrations: Myself
Outcomes
The team had a clear vision for where they wanted to go but a clear problem – users were dropping off during account set up. Like many founders they had a difficult time teasing out what the problem was since they were too close to the solution.
Together with Momentum's founders I helped set priorities of what we would accomplish during our one month intensive engagement. We decided to focus on three main areas: account setup, rules, and impact.
For a week and half we iterated on the onboarding, designing, ideating, arguing, and ultimately deflating each other's arguments by user testing the flows we built.
The process of designing and testing every two days took us from an onboarding process that many users were failing to an onboarding process that has above average completion rates. I've included our iterations of the onboarding redesign below.
We improved the messaging, added a progress bar, sought to break the each part of account set up into intelligible steps.
In testing users still found it too long and got caught up on the difference between connecting to their bank and choosing an account to fund the transaction.
We tried shifting the "why" to earlier in the flow. The users donation would go to fund a specific cause. This version landed worse than the previous one unfortunately.
We improved the users mental model about the task by giving them an overview of the process. I designed an accordion style interface where each step of the sign up would be completed before moving on to the next task.
We connected the users funding source earlier to get the hard work out of the way. This version performed better but users still found a number of the steps unclear, how funding charities worked and connecting to their bank account.
We clarified the messaging around how the funds would be used and simplified connecting the funding account. We also included an active rule button at the end to make the whole process feel more satisfying. This version of the onboarding performed really well during testing.
Once we had brought each part of the app to similar level of polish Hookoo Eeekoo came in and created the visual identity. We now had an app ready for launch.
Giving rules pair major events and everyday actions with automatic donations.
Rules trigger donations to a collection of charties. In my case, I give to clean water each time I buy a cup of coffee.
Your contributions are automatically passed on to the charities you’ve chosen and Momentum helps you understand your impact.
We had a significant challenge on our hands, the giving rules are the core of the app and each rule would have its own custom illustration. That would require a lot of drawing. They also needed to be nothing short of excellent, and time was in short supply. It would be a drawing marathon.
The first set was the most daunting, 34 in all. I only had a few days to nail down the illustration style, but a tight deadline does wonders for getting the creative juices flowing. I developed a groove of completing 6 illustrations a day for the first week. Wake up–draw, short coffee break–draw, have lunch –draw, second coffee break – draw. Rinse and repeat.
The next set was no less challenging. There were 13 collections of charities, each one would have its own editorial illustration. They also needed be distinguishable from rules at a glance.
There were also lots of icons to produce. Every rule, every collection needed an icon to represent it when featured elsewhere in the app. And then there was a whole other set of icons to represent the impact that the charities were creating with their work.
