Odyssey Fund
Web Application
In order for non-profit organizations to manage finances easily, I created a secure, open source endowment and customer management application to not only manage endowment gifts but also stay connected with donors.
Currently, there are expensive software solutions for organizations who receive $100 Million+ in endowments, leaving smaller-scale organizations who generate around $1 Million+ to deal with tools that are tedious and costly.
Role
Product Designer
Team
2 Project Leads
3 Product Designers
6 Developers
Timeline
1 Year
Feb-Dec 2024
Skills/Tools
Figma
User Research
Prototyping
CONTEXT
What is Odyssey Fund?
Odyssey Fund is a Hack4Impact product that I designed from concept to delivery, aiming to provide an open source and accessible platform for thousands of non-profit organizations to manage $1 million+ endowments and donor relations seamlessly. Brought to us by our client David Strip, I worked with two other designers to learn about what existing competitors are lacking and designed many flows to address user concerns. Odyssey is currently being built by the developer team at Hack4Impact.
FINAL PROTOTYPE
Managing Endowments & Customer Donations in one Platform
Unlike our competitors that solely focus on endowment management, Odyssey offers a space to manage finances with different managerial access and ability to connect with donors directly within the platform.
So, how did we get all the way here after two semesters of constant designing, revising, and testing?
USER RESEARCH
Looking into the Competitors
I studied competitor endowment management platforms and CRM (customer relationship management) platforms through guided demos and free trials to establish their purpose, strengths, and weaknesses.
I found that our competitors either specialized in endowments or in customer relations, but there was no perfect product to let users do both.
Struggles with Existing Platforms
I have completed all 6 interviews with endowment managers and donor managers, those ranging from small grassroots organizations to large, $100M+ endowment organizations. I organized the team’s insights into the following affinity diagram:
There were three major points that I gathered from user research.
1
Customization
Importance of customizations in their management tools and visualizations for fund’s performance reports
2
User Frustrations
Managing donors and finances are frustrating to do separately and often donations are also accepted by endowment orgs
3
One Combined Product
Users use multiple softwares to manage their finances, making it laborious to update and sync information
ARCHITECTURE
Digesting all of the Information
Because we had so many insights, I first divided the features into MVP (minimum viable product / originally on our PRD) features and then mapped those features into an information architecture that has been frequently updated.
IDEATION
Words to Visuals
We explored some ideas in sketches, but tried to speed through this part of the process because we wanted to spend more time iterating in mid fidelities. Here are some of my personal sketches for our pages:
Dashboard provides an overview of users’ fund portfolio and contributors. Activity contains filters and a data table to show all the recent transactions that have been made.
Constituents and Funds were sketched by my teammates Sonia and Ashlie. Constituents show the profile and activity of an individual constituent. Funds shows all available funds + detailed information about each fund.
EXPLORATIONS
Wait, scratch the old!
At this point, I had taken over last semester’s mid fidelity designs into the new semester to finalize the project. However, before I did that, I realized that our old designs had many problems.
We needed to fix all of these errors before iterating on our prototypes. Leading to a completely new product...
FINAL DELIVERY
Important Flows, but not All
There were so many flows that I created, including data table customizations and adding a donor, but I included the most complete and updated flows here.
Onboarding + Dashboard ⊹ ࣪ ˖
Importing Data Tables ⊹ ࣪ ˖
Sending a Donor Email ⊹ ࣪ ˖
TAKEAWAYS
Wrapping it Up
Some next steps for Odyssey include adding high fidelity prototypes for smaller flows and updating our design system. With this being my longest design project ever, I have learned many lessons about dev-design collaboration and design thinking.
Make Appropriate Sacrifices
After affinity mapping the competitor research and user interviews, we found ourselves dealing with a lot of potential features. However, being limited by time and engineering constraints, we needed to prioritize the most important flows and rationally sacrifice certain reaches (such as donor grouping & data input).
Last Minute Switchups
Halfway through high fidelity, we were told that there can be multiple contributors and there is no restrictions for endowments. This was a shock! We had been under the assumption from previous data that funds were either restricted or unrestricted with singular contributors. This made us quickly update our designs within a short amount of time.
I really appreciate my team for giving me constructive criticism for every design and gaining first hand experience for my first client project! I am looking forward to seeing the future release of Odyssey Fund and the non-profits that it will impact.
✿ yl3644@cornell.edu ✿
thanks for stopping by! let's connect through design, games, and more ˚ ᡣ𐭩
made with love & matcha in 2025 ⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚