Product Overview + Insight

Zengine is a fully customizable, online database platform whose customer base — ranging from non-profits, organizations, government, and organizations — wanted more than just a way to manage their data. Most provided grants, scholarships, awards, fellowships, and other application-based programs. Unfortunately, most customers used third-party solutions to handle those processes separate from Zengine. However, they preferred to have as many of their needs accommodated by a single system. Zengine realized they could provide that solution through the creation of their own flexible and extensible portal system, and keep customer's data within a single environment. This new portal system would also create brand new opportunities to expand our client categories due to its flexible nature. The creation of a Submission Portal would be our first step.

Multiple Challenges

At the time, Zengine had no easy way of taking multiple layers of data across several forms and intuitively displaying it to constituents as a dynamic application. We had to build a portal environment that could handle workflows and linked information seamlessly in the background, as applicants from all walks of life experienced an application process that was as accessible and frictionless as possible.

We also had to consider the customer, who would play the role of portal administrator. We needed to provide a self-service option so the customer could build their submission portal (or opt for assistance from our implementation team, depending on the complexity of their needs), so their experience had to be clear, logical and painless.

Building a robust and extensible workflow engine to drive the portal flow was critical, so we needed to understand how both administrators and constituents would experience the portal from start to finish — whether they were creating the workflows or stepping through them.

Software accessibility was a huge consideration due to the nature of our clients and their constituents, so compliance became a crucial factor in the overall design vision. Applicants ranged in age greatly — usually high school students applying for scholarships to adults vying for grant money — so developing a solution that satisfied a substantial age gap without comprising design integrity or usability weighed heavy.

Customer Research + Analysis

I worked closely with our implementation team to establish a diverse customer feedback board that provided us with critical analysis of their experiences with the Zengine, the software they had been using for their application-based programs, and how Zengine might deliver a better solution around their data. We broke these discussions down into several one-on-one interview sessions over a period of several months to gather foundational feature requests, pain points with current solutions, and nice-to-haves around potential portal and platform experiences. We had some user assumptions that we vetted and isolated those the interviews had not squashed.

From the feedback sessions, we developed a handful of personas that represented our customer base, and a few others that we hoped to target as potential prospects. Those personas led into several journey and empathy maps based on the various industries we covered. This data provided us a clear understanding of how customers might use the portal differently — and how we would need to account for those variations and potential edge cases without creating division.

Brainstorming + Rapid Design Sprints

Through daily brainstorming and whiteboarding sessions with the product team, we started to sketch out the foundational elements of the platform that would provide the tools to build an environment that would handle customer data. We also spent considerable time vetting user-friendly workflow options and approaches to a stable engine that could easily handle complex relationships without failing.

Once we started to focus on specific feature needs, I established and ran regular design sprints around these initial ideas with the product team, as well as other company stakeholders with a positive return. We were able to pinpoint essential portal elements a prioritization matrix, and put together some lo-fidelity wireframes and MVP prototypes of specific flow interactions and primary portal screens, and presented them to our customer feedback group. Their insight was critical in establishing a hierarchy of needs and feature prioritization.

Low Fidelity Visions

The prototypes received a substantial amount of positive feedback from our group, although some vision oversights were made apparent:

A fair number of users applying to scholarships or grants through a portal needed to have an option optimized for mobile or tablet, especially younger constituents (Further research found that at least 20% of applicants were accessing the portal via mobile);
Equally, a substantial number of applicants are usually lower-income individuals who don't have access to a computer, and traditionally applied through their mobile devices.
From a setup standpoint, administrators found the platform portal configurations to be very challenging at times due to their volume, and lack of inline form creation — having to bounce back and forth throughout the platform instead of reaming in a single focused building area.

I went back to the wires and brainstormed on potential UI solutions for multiple form factors to address portal responsiveness, and collaborated with the development team to find a clear way to focus on the inline form creation under some technical hurdles. After landing on potential solutions for both, we again presented our vision through higher fidelity designs to the customer group and received positive responses.

High Fidelity Testing

Once we felt comfortable with the majority of our portal configurations and user-facing experiences, I put together higher fidelity mockups and interaction flow prototypes for testing. This time I wanted to get age-range specific, targeted users to test the interfaces so we could gather relevant feedback. We leveraged a pool of testers — ranging from friends and family, to customer-related participants, to random people off the street — and had them walk through our UI in real time, without any guidance or bias. The majority of users found the experience to be stress-free, easy to navigate, clear, and pragmatic. The most frequent friction-based feedback centered around button messaging and configuration navigation. I added simple, one-word messaging to buttons that previously relied on iconography to increase their affordance, and rethought the configuration schema and adopted a more hierarchical approach in a persistent left rail. Additional live testing proved that these tweaks made a huge difference.

Going Live

Initially, we opted for a limited beta release to a few of our most collaborative customers and partners to help iron out anything we had not uncovered during our testing phase. Minor polishing was needed, but for the most part, the new submission portal system was successful.

While we were ideating on the submission portal, we also had to solve the other part of this two-pronged experience — the Review Portal. The portals were intended to work synchronously, so building them together in our agile product environment was key to their iterative nature.

The submission portal opened avenues to completely new verticals of customers that we had very little chance of attracting (or maintaining) in the past. Our renewals skyrocketed, as did our sign ups. Our customer base has grown well over 60% since its launch, with new customers adopting the platform and using the software on a daily basis.

Looking Back + Forward

The portal project was a large-scale epic build that started in 2016 and spanned almost an entire year. Since its launch, we have iterated and improved upon it constantly — regularly gathering feedback from customers and constituents to help evolve the product and user experience. I have consistent focus groups and personal calls with clients to gather feedback on how they specifically use the portal, test out new feature ideas, and collaborate on solutions to reduce cognitive load and friction.

Simplifying Application-Based Program Experiences