Endaoment Showdaon Design Project
A fundraising competition for philanthropy in the crypto space.
Overview
Th goal of this design project was to design a community-focused fundraising competition for Endaoment, a crypto project that lets users donate crypto to over 15,000 nonprofits.
The Problem
October to December is the biggest season for charitable donations. Endaoment, a nonprofit making it possible to give crypto to charity, wants to see how to create an engaging charitable giving competition.
The Result
A fundraising competition experience for their website.
Link to Figma PrototypeProject Background
I completed this design project from September to November of 2021 as a DesignLab project with the Endaoment team. I had spent time researching the crypto space since the beginning of 2021 and was focused on projects making it easier to donate crypto to charity. The Endaoment team gave me the design assignment to come up with an online fundraising competition for charitable crypto holders. The goal was to raise awareness about crypto philanthropy and explore what an engaging online fundraiser could be like.
Since crypto and philanthropic finance are both complicated spaces, this project was probably the most challenging UX project I have done.
Research Phase
In this research phase, my client an I wanted to know what motivates crypto holders to give charitably and how to make them excited about giving to create a fun and engaging fundraising competition.
Survey Results Findings
A short survey was sent out to groups of crypto holders.
The main reason respondents give to charity is because they want to help others.
Respondents were more motivated to give collectively than to give individually.
Giving to charity to lessen tax burden interested 43% of respondents.
User Research Findings
Four user research interviews were conducted to understand what motivates and engages crypto holders when giving to charity.
The main reason participants give to charity is to do good or make the world a better place.
Participants with thousands of dollars of crypto assets were not necessarily that educated on crypto concepts like DAOs and making blockchain transactions.
Participants often give when asked by someone they know and find giving most fun as a community.
Crypto Personas
This fundraising competition is focused on letting crypto organizations called DAOs (decentralize autonomous organizations) to give together. Since the crypto community has varying involvement and understanding of DAOs. Based on design research, I identified three personas for this project.
Research Takeaways
In the research phase of this project, I quickly had to wrap around how people thinking about giving crypto to charity in the crypto space and how donor-advised and community funds work in the nonprofit space. Endaoment founder, Robbie Heeger's vision is to make it possible for nonprofits to raise cryptocurrency funds since it is a fast-growing asset class.
Based on research findings, it was clear that a crypto fundraising competition would have to be very simple, because crypto holders don't necessarily have a strong understanding of crypto concepts. Research participants had most fun in in-person charity fundraisers such as dinners, galas or sports events. Participants could not recall meaningful online fundraising experiences. Making a fundraising competition that could bring people together in support of shared causes was something that interested participants.
Exploration Phase
Since the crypto space is so complicated, I created three personas of varying involvement in crypto: someone who runs a DAO, someone who participates in a DAO and someone who just trades crypto. In the exploration phase, I created storyboards and user flows for all three to understand how each could engage in a crypto fundraising competition.
0xCarrie Storyboard and User Flow
0xCarrie is an anon DAO contributor who wants to set her DAO up for the fundraising competition. The focus on this user flow was to identify the shortest user experience to let a DAO set up a charitable community fund with Endaoment.
Trevor Storyboard and User Flow
This flow focuses on Trevor, a DAO token holder an the process he would have to take to get his DAO set up with a charitable community fund for his DAO.
Bobby Storyboard and User Flow
In this flow, Bobby a crypto trader who isn't too familiar with DAOs, navigates the Showdaon leaderboard to make a donation towards that resonates with him.
Exploration Takeaways
In this exploration phase, I got a much clearer picture of the steps people take to do things in the crypto space - a space new and with new behavioral norms. The main takeaway was that there could be lots of steps to get things done when it comes to setting up a fund and donating to it with crypto. They most important focus for this fundraising competition was to see how there could be as few clear steps as possible to let users give to charity with crypto.
Design Phase
In this design phase, I had to think creatively to design a crypto experience despite the ability to pull from other experiences since crypto philanthropy is such a new space.
The main challenge when designing this project was to create an intuitive experience despite the complexity of crypto transfers and nonprofit tax deductions.
Wireframes
In these wireframes, I lay out a leaderboard design with clear ways to donate, learn about the competition, add a fund to the DAO and share the competition.
Figma Link
Wireframe Call-outs
1. Sub-Navigation - This project lives within the greater Endaoment website so I created a three button sub-navigation on the home page of the fundraising competition so that users could find the pages they need to get to to take part in the fundraising competition.
2. Leaderboard Layout - Endaoment did not have a leaderboard layout on their website to reference, so I laid out how a leaderboard for community funds by how much money has been donated to each one. In this leaderboard, they clearly see who is in first place, the names of the funds, they can hover over details, see how much money is in each fund and go to a donation page.
3.Set Up Your Fund Page - One part of this crypto fundraiser is that some groups may want to join who are not already signed up with Endaoment. I made it as easy as possible for those new groups to get onboarded because the more new funds sign up, the more awareness Endaoment will have and more donations it can raise.
4. Share Page - Making the compeition easy to share was critical to the client. On this page, I had to rethink share-ability because unlike twitter or facebook, discord does not have easy share embeds because discord servers are usually not public. In this wireframe, I proposed a prewritten text that a user can customize and then share in their discord server as a way to make it easy to share the fundraiser on private Discord servers.
Style Tile
In this style tile, I designed based off of assets from Endaoment's new brand. This leaderboard design could work well for other table and leaderboard experiences in the future.
Usability Test Findings and Iterations
Key findings and iterations:
The prize money and competition deadline were not prominent enough on the page and participants was confused how the exerpience worked. Iteration: prize money and competition deadline were made more prominent to make the contest more intuitive. (See Home page before and after to the right)
The "How it Works" page was too text heavy and needed to be easier to digest. Iteration: The "How it Works" page was made into a 3-step tutorial to make it the content more engaging and easier to digest.
Participants did not see the "learn more" button which was an important for users to be able to learn about funds. Iteration: the "learn more" button was bolded and purple to stand out more.
Conclusion - Final Design
The final design was meant to be the simplest, most engaging design for a crypto fundraising experience.
My biggest learnings in this project was how to design in an emerging space where there are few or no existing experiences to reference, the way people think about giving charitably and some of the audiences that exist in the crypto space.
Figma link
More OF MY Work
