SmartyGrants Product Strategy
Overview
This work served two purposes, including the review and redesign of a component based UX/UI of the product and identifying opportunities for the Our Community Leadership Team to consider. Not only for SmartyGrants Applicants but for connected opportunities across their services.
Problem definition
The SmartyGrants platform is hamstrung by it's legacy architecture and design debt over the past decade. The biggest technical constraints currently don't allow for autosave functionality and progressive error handling and most noticeably, does not support responsive components for different device sizes.
For users, this manifested in a major problem where people were trying to apply for disaster relief during bushfires and floods where they only had access to their phones.
Target audience
SmartyGrants enables 1,364,992 unique users. These can be segmented into 3 main customer archetypes; Grant Makers, Expert Applicants and Novice Applicants.
Our focus for this piece of work was only the applicant facing part of SmartyGrants
Responsibilities
I was responsible for leading Product Management strategy, Design and discovery activities and UX/UI component library creation.
Design process
I began by conducting Initial discovery activities with the team, including, task mapping, personas, heuristic analysis and subject matter expert discussions. This was followed by a complete product review document and presentation to the SmartGrants leadership team.
In tandem to this work I was consulting the engineering team on our approach for a like for like component rebuild of the current site with the improvements we identified in the discovery process. I led an intensive day long Agile estimation session with the engineering team.
Key opportunities included:
- Customer activation with connected services
- SSO profile management
- Pre-application checklists
- Expert Applicant dashboard
- Component based responsive redesign
- Branding strategy & consistency
Constraints
The SmartyGrants team are early in their journey of adopting new ways of thinking about Product Development. The amount of work required to move the product to a more modern architecture will require a significant investment of time and resources.
Results
This work successfully identified multiple service design, cross promotion and product opportunities for SmartyGrants. Where initially they were only focused on delivering operational improvements and bug fixes.
In a three month period we delivered:
- A usability report of the SmartyGrants applicant site
- End to end task model
- A responsive Figma component library based off Tailwind CSS
- Future state primary user flows
- Agile user stories and estimation