What We Have Done
Last week, we hosted a mid-year conference where we presented our project to UVic students and industry professionals. At this conference, we showcased our progress and allowed people to interact with our system. This gave us the opportunity to observe how non-technical users interact with the system and figure out what improvements still needed to be made. Overall, people found our system useful and indicated that it is a good use case of AI for solving real world problems. We were able to iterate on the feedback from this conference and fine-tune the UI experience for the Campaign Creation feature.
We have also been busy working on our second feature – Meaningful Engagement, which allows nonprofits to engage their donors more effectively with the help of AI for a more personalized experience. At the mid-year conference, we were able to showcase our high-fidelity Figma prototypes for this feature, and we received a lot of positive feedback on how useful this feature will be for nonprofits. We have since been refining these designs based on comments from users and our Community Partner to ensure a more user-centered experience. We are excited to share that we are now ready to begin the front-end development phase, marking another significant milestone in this project!
Challenges We Have Faced
During our usability testing, we found that most users don’t find our system intuitive. Thanks to their feedback, we reworked our user experience and now the AI generation process is more obvious to the user. Based on the newest round of usability testing, users find the newly designed system clearer and easier to use.
While developing the 1:1 Outreach feature of Meaningful Engagement, we have run into some difficulties with requirements engineering. Over this sprint, we have worked on multiple iterations of our front-end design for this feature, and each time we present new designs to our Community Partner, it results in another round of reworking the design. This challenge that we are facing is due to two things: evolving ideas and unclear communication. While designing our front-end, we are continuously coming up with new ideas on more clear ways to present our work, and our Community Partner also had a different vision for the product than we did. Also, since our community partner is unfamiliar with the software that we have developed, there is some misunderstanding of the technical limits we are facing.
Goals for the Next Sprint
As we’re coming close to the end of term, we want to maximize our development time over the next two weeks. This will allow us plenty of time at the end to get user feedback on our designs and improve them in the last two sprints.
We have been continuously refining the campaign and fundraiser creation with AI over the past weeks and, thanks to all the valuable user feedback, we are now able to call that feature done. Nothing is ever really done since there are always bugs that can be found, but it can definitely be put into a lower priority on our task board.
For Meaningful Engagement, we have created high-fidelity designs in Figma. These prototypes have been redesigned a few times in this sprint to reach an experience that our community partner likes. Having almost reached a final draft of the design, we can now start implementing the designs in code. This will be our main focus over the next two weeks. We hope to finish development, address user feedback, and start preparing for Giving Tuesday when nonprofits will be using our system for their campaigns.
