A quick (and nerdy) aside:

Capers Jones has researched and written about  software development for a long time and his findings on the cost of a defect over time have been widely reported.  If you’re not familiar with Jones’ research, he’s basically proven that a software bug gets more expensive the longer it goes undetected (duh).  Recently, he expanded this research to include the ten most costly types of bugs.   The illustration below depicts the cost of a bug over time and the top four most costly types of bugs.

Notice a pattern? The most expensive stuff can be caught before you code and directly relate to user experience.

This is why we’ve developed a rigorous, client-centric design process. Here’s how it’s usually done:

Design is Everyone’s Job

At Global Cloud, we’re broken up into teams comprised of product managers, account managers, application developers, interactive designers, QA and customer support representatives. During the design process, everyone’s involved. We’re all exposed to our clients and their stories. We’re all responsible for sharing ideas and uncovering important details.

1. Interview the experts. What problem(s) are we trying to solve?

Any mechanic will tell you that it’s better to hear “there’s a wonky sound when I speed up” than “I think I have a bad ball bearing.” The description of the wonky sound is far more helpful in diagnosing a real problem and how it might relate to other problems. So the first step for us is defining what problem (or opportunity) we’re trying to solve. We start by interviewing the experts — our clients. These interviews are pretty simple and go like this:

“We’re investigating X. Can you tell me about your world related to X?”

From there, our job is just to listen and ask a lot of questions. At the end of the interview, the goal is to clearly state what problem we’re trying to solve. When we’ve done this with enough customers, we not only understand the similarities and nuances of the problem, but also have real customer stories to back it up.

2. Conduct usability studies

Another way to define the problem is through usability studies. If we’re revising existing functionality, watching or hearing how current customers work through a given process can be really insightful. We typically ask a number of people to perform a task. Whenever possible, we watch them as they do the task. We always ask them their feedback: How simple or hard was it to do? Did you find anything awkward or frustrating?

3. Survey competing sites and sites with similar processes

Once we’ve defined the problem, we review competitive and other sites to see how they have approached similar issues. It’s important to be able to admit when the competition does something well (this is hard). We find it as important to look outside of our industry for new ideas and examples. For instance, when we were recently designing our Theming functionality, we reviewed leading Blog software to see if there were things that we could glean. When we were working on revising our registration and donation processes, we researched great ecommerce sites.

4. Review Usage Patterns

Another great source of insight are usage statistics. We use Google Analytics extensively on our software to track a number of aspects. What paths are users taking to do a task? Where are they aborting tasks and at what frequency? What are there common screen resolutions, browsers, etc. This information is very helpful when making nuanced decisions. For instance, we were recently discussing whether we should continue to support a browser that some team members thought was obsolete. If we could stop supporting the browser, we’d be able to use more sophisticated technical approaches. We went to the analytics and found that that the percentage of our users using the browser was still significant. Supporting the browser, was therefore, not an option and our designs would have to be re-thought.

5. Report findings and brainstorm solutions

Once all of this information has been gathered by various product team members, we synthesize it into a report and discuss. We then brainstorm solutions as a group. We’ve found it really beneficial to have multiple perspectives in these discussions. How hard will it be to design? Code? Test? Train? Support? Ultimately, we’re all trying to boil ideas down to the most elegant solution.

7. Design rapid prototypes, review and refine

Even with great communication, a lot can be lost in translation. Being able to see and interact with a solution — even in rough from — tends to uncover new ideas and questions. Once we’ve had a chance to brainstorm solutions, our designers get down to rapid, low-tech prototypes. The key is to see a solution as fast as possible to help evolve the discussion. We work fast and dirty while prototyping, often on paper or white boards. We then rinse and repeat quickly, getting more and more detailed with each iteration.

8. Return to customers with solutions and prototypes

When we’re all happy with the solution, we split up and call the experts back, explaining our ideas and walking them through prototypes. This can be a humbling experience if customers point out, as they sometimes do, that we’ve missed the point entirely. In that case, it’s back to step 7. In most cases, our clients will come up with new insights and details based on their experience that would not have been possible for us to think of.

9. Develop formal concept

Having incorporated client feedback, we develop a final concept and run by the team one last time before coding.

10. Integrate code into the system

Our interactive designers and application developers collaborate closely to integrate the designs into the code and technical design. Often, unforeseen details come up at this stage. When this happens, we stop the process and sit down with the team to discuss and revise. In some cases, we have to return to clients again to help resolve debates.

At this point, we’re ready to write code, thoroughly test, roll out and train our clients. But the design process isn’t complete.

11. Conduct usability studies

Once the new feature or enhancement has been out for a while, we conduct usability tests again to make sure that we’ve solved the problem we set out to solve. It’s often the case that we find there is more work to be done after these studies. In this case, we just return to step 1. That’s OK — the goal for us is constant improvement

Themes

Themes are pre-built design layouts that can be applied to DonorDrive. Themes can be applied at the organizational level or at the event level, giving you the ability to have distinct looks for each of your events. You may choose from a library of pre-designed themes that can be customized and applied easily. If you would like Global Cloud to create custom themes for your organization, contact your Account or Project Manager.

New My Account Landing Pages

To make the constituent user experience more intuitive, DonorDrive has redesigned how your constituents access their events and donations.

• Donors: After making a donation, donors will be taken directly to the “Donations I Have Given” area where they can easily make further donations or download a PDF receipt for each donation.
• Participants: After participants register or login, participants will be taken directly to their “My Events” area where they can easily send email invitations, manage fundraising pages and much more.

Team Pages linked to Fundraising Pages

When a visitor navigates to a Team Fundraising Page, they will be able to access all team member fundraising pages by clicking on each participant’s name in the team member list.

More Control of DonorDrive Settings

We’ve added increased flexibility to DonorDrive. You can now control website and event settings. Administrators with appropriate access will be able to:

• Choose a payment gateway for your organization or event
• Control many aspects of how your organization, event and participant fundraising pages are presented, including whether a thermometers and statistics appear.
• Enable or Disable General Donations.
• Enable or Disable Personal Campaigns.
• Enable or Disable Offline Donations.

More Control of Permissions

You now have greater control over administrative user access. New Checkpoints, or permission levels will allow you to restrict the following:

• Accessing specific email campaigns
• Accessing specific email lists
• Accessing specific events in Reports, not all events

Application Programming Interface (API)

Global Cloud can now partner with you to build custom extensions and integrations between DonorDrive and your existing systems. Please contact your Project Manager to explore these options.

What’s Coming

The following is a list of high-level items we’ll be researching and developing in the coming months. If you are interested in learning more or providing feedback on how we should build these features, please contact support@globalcloud.net.

Family/Group Constituents:
The ability to register family or friends in one transaction.

Promotion Codes:
The ability to assign promotional codes to events to allow for free or discounted registration.

Scheduled Reports:
The ability to save custom exports and have those exports sent via email on a regular schedule.

Preview Event:
The ability for Administrators to fully preview an event prior to publishing.

Improvements to Invitations:
Improved invitation workflow to enable constituents to more effectively communicate with their supporters/team members.

Improved Facebook Integration:
We’ve received such great response from our Facebook widget that we’re looking exploring ways to integrate in deeper and more substantive ways.

Default Image for Fundraising Pages:
Enable administrators to set default images for all fundraising pages.

Improve Donation Process
Continued streamlining of our Donation Process to improve conversion rates.

Custom Content Blocks on all DonorDrive Pages:
Customizable blocks of content on every page and form for administrators to provide tips for constituents.

Event Search (by city, promo code, org code)
Enables administrators to conduct more specific event searches.

Donate to Team:
Allows donors to donate to a team as a whole as well as to a participant.

A large item we tackled in combination with the smaller enhancements that were rolled out last month was a fundamental change to the DonorDrive online donation process.

The Problem

If a donor had not yet created an account or was not logged into the system, they would be taken away from the donation process to perform either of these functions before completing a donation (Figure 1).

Figure 1

We affectionately referred to this account creation/login screen as the “Hump”, since it proved to be a major obstacle to the donation process. Donors became confused when they were taken away from the action they were trying to perform: make a donation. They asked, “Why do I need an account? Do I already have an account? How do I request my password? I just want to make a donation. I don’t need all this account stuff.”

Frankly, nothing else in DonorDrive really matters if we’re preventing our users from completing donations quickly and easily. So we immediately set out to fix things.

The Research

We conducted usability testing on both our registration and donation processes. We then conducted “deep dive” personal interviews with DonorDrive clients to get a more focused picture of the problem at hand and potential solutions. We discovered that:

• Users generally did not want to create an account. They simply want to give a donation.
• Users thought the amount of information required on our donation screens was excessive. I.E. Salutation, birth date, business address and phone, etc.

The Solution

Sayonara Hump! Don’t let the door hit ya on the way out. The first order of business was to remove the Hump screen altogether, but this would reintroduce systematic problems that the Hump was intended to solve in the first place. If the user hadn’t logged in or created an account yet, how could they complete their donation? We worked through many iterations of designs, exploring ideas and potential paths to take to integrate a method of logging in or creating an account.

First, instead of taking the user away from the donation process to login to an existing account, we placed a small, convenient login box at the top of the donation form (Figure 2). When the user logs into the system, the page simply refreshes and they remain on the donation form to continue the process. The system even pre-fills most of their information for them. Easy as pie. That solves logging in for existing users.

Figure 2

Second, how to handle new accounts. Our thinking when we first built the donation process in DonorDrive was that users would appreciate being able to come back to the website to check on previous donations, to see how the organization is doing fundraising-wise, and possibly interact in other ways with the organization, such as participating in an event, etc. However, our user research and interviews said otherwise. We commonly heard that donors really didn’t care about having an account. They just wanted to give their hard-earned money to the organization. So we made account creation when donating an optional process to the user after they’ve completed their donation.

At the end of the donation process, the donor is asked if they’d like to set their password for their account (Figure 3). If they do set their own password, they’re good to go and can login to the My Account area of the website to see their donations. If the donor chooses not to set a password, they can come back to the site to make subsequent donations without having to log in.

Figure 3

Third, we greatly reduced the amount of information being asked for from the user. The form consists mainly of billing information now. Extraneous info is out.

Did It Work?

All in all, this enhancement has shown an excellent improvement. We’ve seen a strong increase in completed donations after we rolled it out and continue to fine-tune things.

We’re constantly working to better DonorDrive. If you have any ideas, please let us know!

From the press release:

“We worked closely with Children’s Miracle Network over the past year to meet their strict requirements for online fundraising. It’s motivating to collaborate with an amazing organization like Children’s Miracle Network. To help improve children’s lives with our software and services feels great to the entire Global Cloud family,” said Paul Ghiz, Co-Founder, Global Cloud.

Tony Rehmer from Children’s Miracle Network added: “We selected DonorDrive™ after an exhaustive search among the other leading online providers. We believe DonorDrive™ offers the best tools at the best value. We look forward to our long-term relationship with Global Cloud, the makers of DonorDrive™.”

Children’s Miracle Network is an international non-profit organization that raises funds for more than 170 children’s hospitals. Countless individuals, 90 organizations and 400 media partners unite with Children’s Miracle Network hospitals to help sick and injured kids in local communities. Donations to Children’s Miracle Network create miracles by funding medical care, research and education that saves and improves the lives of 17 million children each year.

To learn more, visit: www.ChildrensMiracleNetwork.org

Read the full press release…

While our team continually challenges DonorDrive for improvement, it’s our users who provide us with real world feedback. We’re actively working on many suggestions and improvements, but I’d like to highlight a few that we’ve completed and rolled out recently:

• Ditch the Salutation Field
• Support Youtube, Flickr, and Website Links on Fundraising Pages
• Provide an Event Summary Printout

Ditch the Salutation Field

Very early in DonorDrive’s planning, we debated internally to include salutation as a required field in the registration form, both as a courtesy to registrants and as a valuable piece of demographic information to organizations. As it turns out, this field proved to be a roadblock to registration rather than to add value.

• Registrants questioned its necessity in being required, let alone asked for.
• Many users register for more than one person, I.E. a couple, a family, etc., even though the DonorDrive system supports a single user per registration. In this case, the standard salutations of Mr. Mrs. Ms. don’t apply.

Users have asked us to remove this unnecessary field. We agreed. The salutation field has been removed from the registration process on all DonorDrive websites.

Support Youtube, Flickr, and Website Links on Fundraising Pages

Initially the personal and team fundraising pages were very well received. But with the explosion of social media, request upon request was made for Youtube and Flickr support, as well as the ability to link out to a few favorite websites. We set out to integrate those capabilities as soon as possible.

Participants and teams can now add videos, photo slideshows and three website links to their fundraising pages with a simple copy and paste. Just grab the embed code from Youtube or Flickr and paste into your fundraising page edit form.

Provide an Event Summary Printout

Many Organizations require a participant to bring some sort of handout or registration/donations printout to the event, whether it be for tracking purposes, final registration, fundraising tracking, etc. So we integrated a simple Event Summary printout under the participant’s donations details in the My Account area.

Event Summary details:

• Participant’s first and last name
• Verified total funds raised
• Unverified cash & check funds raised
• Team information (if part of a team)
• Event information
• Waiver with signature line and date (if required by the organization)

That wraps it up for now. We have many more enhancements either on the table or already in development. We’ll keep you updated on our progress!

I’d like to take this chance to welcome all of the following organizations to the DonorDrive family:

• Ault Park Concours d’Elegance
• The Cancer Institute of New Jersey Foundation
• Community Alliance
• Irish Pub Philadelphia Children’s Foundation
• The Jean Cadet Restavek Foundation
• Re-elect Leslie Ghiz for City Council
• Ride For A Reason
• Spina Bifida Association of Cincinnati
• Stop Child Trafficking Now
• Susan G. Komen Foundation – Knoxville, TN Chapter
• The University of Cincinnati Foundation

Whew! That’s quite a list. We’re ecstatic to have the opportunity to help each and every one of these organizations meet and exceed their fundraising goals.

Since the Winter Release, we have made a significant number of incremental releases in response to the feedback from our clients. These include things like support for personal campaigns, improved deliverability on constituent-initiated emails (donation solicitations, updates and team invitations), and adding support for more flexible content on personal fundraising pages.

In the coming days and weeks, we have a lot of awesome new features that we can’t wait to share. Among the updates we’re currently working on, the next major release entails a substantial overhaul to the existing donation/registration process in order to streamline the experience for end users. Stay tuned for more!

By Tim Mixell, Senior Developer

• Improved Reports
• Multilingual Capability
• Conversion Tracking
• Company Management
• Receipts

Access to New Features - Most of the features will appear in your DonorDrive® right away. Some features, such as Corporate Management and Multilingual Capabilities, can be made available at your request.

Training - View our Training Schedule with dates and times available to maximize new features.

Customer Support - As always, if you have any questions or suggestions regarding your DonorDrive® software, access our Customer Support Center.

Did you know?

• DonorDrive® has reached over 1.2 Million Users
• DonorDrive® has helped raise over $42 Million for non-profits
• You have the ability with DonorDrive® to market your cause to the 260 Million active users on Facebook and Myspace.

Our mission is to empower nonprofit organizations with web-based software and services to maximize their development capacity by fostering long-term constituent relationships, exceed financial goals and deliver on its mission.

Dance Marathon at UCLA (DM) is the largest student-organized philanthropic event on the West Coast. Initiated and run entirely by students, the 26-hour dance-a-thon unites college students, activists, and community members in the fight against pediatric AIDS.

UCLA Dance Marathon just broke $179,000 raised with DonorDrive™! Congratulations!

http://ucla.donordrive.com

By Dan Volkens, Interactive Designer
Posted in Client Success, News Tagged: dance marathon, DonorDrive, Fundraising, ucla, Walks ]]> http://blog.donordrive.com/2009/02/10/donordrive%c2%ae-ucla-dance-marathon-update-2/feed/ 0 dvolkens