EVERGIVE

As the Seed-stage startup’s second hire and lead designer, I worked to ship an entire mobile-payments ecosystem - and even designed marketing assets, hoodies, and a beer pong table!

Overview

Evergive started as a mobile payment startup built to facilitate charitable giving. To better meet the needs of our partners and donors, we evolved the experience into a private social community platform meant to increase overall engagement and donations. We went to market targeting the 100 billion+ in annual faith-based donations.

My ROLE

I partnered directly with our Co-founders, Engineering and Sales teams, along with our external stakeholders to help shape our focus, product roadmap, and requirements while executing all phases of the design process, from insight to handoff. Along the way I also sourced and managed our contract designers.

IMPACT

Design -> Launch -> Repeat - In a startup, nothing matters if you don’t ship - quickly. I’m very proud to have worked my butt off to design v1 & v2 of Evergive including iOS and Android apps, a web-based experience, and a partner-facing community and donation management platform.

My first funnel win! A key win was improving the conversion and adoption of the app through an optimized progressive onboarding experience for web & mobile - 43% increased user engagement during first-app experience

Elevated the role of design - Finally, I worked to cultivate a human-centered approach in the business to uncovering opportunities and solving problems as we tackled growth, gathering partner and user feedback and distilling those insights into features and improvements.

TAKEAWAYS

Design efficiently - We spent way too much time creating everything from scratch. When we first launched, we'd made specific iOS and Android designs, and almost everything was custom except for icons and a few bootstrap libraries. Not only was our experience slow to design and develop, but it was also challenging to maintain as it evolved. When Material Design was released in the summer of 2014, I grabbed their system and applied it to our experience, earning buy-in to scrap what we had and relaunch. It took about six weeks, but the result was a more consistent experience and an unbelievable amount of new-found tailwind to speed up screen-level decision making.     

Seek evidence - We were super scrappy. We moved fast. We broke things. While it's easy to dismiss a usability test's investment or the trouble of setting up user interviews, it's hard to recover from a wrong decision. While I'm proud of finding opportunities to bring a human-centered practice, we certainly cut some process corners along the way. The corners we cut came at a cost, too, and more rigor in our evidence-based decision making would have helped us move ahead with a higher chance of success. 

Advocate for iteration - We spent way too much time debating our marketing site messaging and content, and a bunch of other decisions. In addition to leveraging evidence to help resolve directions, I learned that advocating for iteration was a way to lower the stakes of a decision. The answer is never "which one," but rather "yes, these are great. We should test both". Not only is that the best way to get to the truth, but it allows teams to de-risk decisions that feel pivotal.