What We Have Done
During this sprint, we have accomplished each goal that we had set out to complete. At the beginning of this sprint, our team went to Vancouver to meet in person with our community partner’s team! During this visit, we were able to integrate our code into MeaningfulWork’s codebase, which led to our first feature being functional on the MeaningfulWork staging environment. Having this feature deployed allows us to easily get user feedback on our design, which we will begin iterating on during the next sprint.
We have also developed a code pipeline that auto-deploys our software updates to MeaningfulWork’s live environment. This allows us to follow industry best practices of Continuous Integration and Deployment. It also helps us save the manual effort required in deploying changes to our code.
Later in the sprint, we started working on our next big deliverable: the Donor Engagement feature. The goal of this feature is to use AI to help non-profits generate personalized updates and thank yous to donors to increase donor engagement. So far, we have built a skeleton front end for testing, created four backend endpoints, and integrated one of the endpoints with the front end. We are currently working on accessing more data from individual campaigns, to allow for more personalized AI generated content.
Challenges We’ve Faced
While we’ve accomplished a significant milestone in feature development, certain aspects still require attention. One of our biggest challenges has been gathering meaningful feedback from non-profit organizations during user testing. Despite reaching out to several groups, the response has been limited. However, we’re continuing to engage with more non-profits, hoping to be able to gather the insights we need to refine the service.
Another challenge we’ve faced has been ensuring users can follow the platform’s intended workflow. During early testing, many users found the interface confusing, which highlighted the areas that require clear guidance in the user flow. This has told us that our next step should be improving navigation and providing more detailed instructions to help users engage with the platform as intended.
Goals for the Next Sprint
For the upcoming two weeks, we have a lot of work to do! For starters, we want to address the user feedback we have received for our Campaign Creation feature. We want our users to understand the flow of the application so they can use it without confusion. We will bring this feedback up with MeaningfulWork’s design team and come up with ways to address this. For example, when a user initially visits the campaign creation page, they can be given a tour of what each user interaction will do. Furthermore, one of the NP partners mentioned that giving a lot of instructions throughout the page will help the user get more familiar with the app.
While we fix bugs and maintain our deployed feature, we also want to continue the development work of our Donor Engagement feature in this sprint. With the initial prototype complete, we need to further refine the AI responses. To do so, we will want to solidify the different system prompts we provide to the AI. During this sprint, we also hope to do more front-end development of this feature. So far, our efforts have been dedicated towards a low-fidelity prototype that showcases the AI responses. By the end of the next two weeks, we hope to have finished the development of high-fidelity prototypes. This will give us enough time till the end of November to fix bugs, gather user feedback, and deploy the feature on MeaningfulWork’s platform.