Inspiration
Google's One Today had a simple goal: to encourage users to donate every day. Users could look for organizations to support, donate to charities, or invite others to the app by paying for one of their donations. It generated revenue by charging 1.9% on every dollar donated. However, the app slowly lost its users over its 6-year lifespan, causing it to get shut down by Google early last year. We decided that the opportunity to engage users in donating every day was too impactful to give up.
Target Audience
Our target users are donors who are interested in discovering and learning more about new charities daily. We wanted to target social donors -- people who could share and leverage the platform as part of a community!
Issues with One Today
Firstly, by yourself, you could only give $1 to a project per day. This was a limit on the amount of money that you could give to projects you cared about. People naturally migrated to other products like GoFundMe that offered more flexibility in how much you could donate.
Secondly, donating is social, but One Today didn’t make that easy. One Today offered features like donation matching for you and your friends. But your donations functioned as pledges instead. Paying for your donation was a separate process in the user flow outside of making a donation.
Third: It’s hard to donate daily without an incentive. One Today didn’t incentivize people enough to donate every day beyond the initial download. Because not enough people were revisiting the app to make credit card transactions, Google couldn’t create enough revenue to keep the program.
What it does
First, we’ve removed the cap on donations. You can now give as much as you want to new causes every day. You can learn more about your cause before donating and see the real-world impact in your Giving Profile.
Second, we’ve introduced a new feature called Fundraisers. You can create your own fundraiser, or team up with people in your neighborhood or around the world to raise money for different causes.
Third, we’re offering challenges for being a part of One Today: the more people you get to join your fundraiser and the more you donate daily, the more Google or corporate sponsors will match you. Challenges reset every evening, encouraging users to continue to come back daily. We’ll also encourage you to get involved by promoting all fundraisers you create around the world.
How we built it
Tools: Figma, Framer, and Figjam. We created our initial wireframes on Figma, and then used Google's Material Design UI kit to keep consistency with the brand.
Challenges we ran into
Time management was definitely something that was difficult for us. We were also learning how to use Framer, Figjam, and Figma all at the same time so it was often difficult to learn the tools as this is our first design hackathon!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Not pulling an all-nighter! We also learned how to animate on Framer which was super impactful because it was fun to see our designs in action. We managed to build out the design for an entire app – a big win on our part.
What we learned
We learned the importance of great product design and business sense. Often, we had to take out parts of our user flow and design because they didn't fit with our vision. We also had some parts of the design that we had to revise or toss out when they didn't work.
Next steps
We'd love to conduct further usability tests and test out the fundraiser logic by running some fundraisers of our own! We're also interested in revisiting this project to introduce more interactivity and animation into the site. One thing we'd love to try is to do micro-interactions with the design -- that's our next step!
Built With
- figjam
- figma
- framer
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