UX/UI design
Visual design
Product design
Branding
Illustration
Elbi is an innovative platform that revolutionises charitable giving by bringing together people, brands and charities to make philanthropy easy and rewarding. Their mission is to connect users with charities, campaigns and causes that they care about. It provides a platform that allows users to contribute in non-traditional, fun and engaging ways.
The challenge we were set was to design and build a platform that allowed Elbi to share campaigns with users in a regular engaging manner.
Together we designed the brand from scratch and designed an iOS app that formed the core of he program. Additionally we designed all the other creative assets and got the project from core idea to MVP launch.
A core part of the Elbi proposition was an insight around the way users engaged with charitable causes. Traditionally charitable giving has always been the main way in which people engage with charities. We wanted to expand this to offer more than just the traditional monetary donations. Additionally a large focus was put on creating sustainable re-engagement. Every action was a ‘Micro-action’. The idea was that we could make it easy and quick to show support in a multitude of different ways. This in turn would encourage users to engage with the platform on a regular basis.
We wanted to be able to introduce users to causes and campaigns they may not already no about. The app was designed to service 3 campaigns per day to their home feed. Each one had a micro action attached and took just a few minutes to engage with.
We designed four key micro-action tools for user to engage with on a daily basis. Initially these were Draw, Write, Vote and Photo. Every campaign had a micro action tool assigned to it and through these our users could engage with the cause and create unique content in a matter of minutes. Additionally there was a ‘micro-donate’ feature where users could give donations of 20p at a time reinforcing the idea of little and often.
First up was the draw tool. This tool was aimed at allowing users to unleash their creative side in a simple, quick and fun way. We gave them access to a number of basic tools for launch with colours, fills, pens and a simple eraser for the MVP product.
Next up was the 'Write' tool. We wanted to keep this simple but intuitive with the ability for the user to personalise the coloured background so that their message stands out from the crowd. Future integrations that were planned for were elements such as stickers and emojis.
We also designed and creating a voting tool. The aim of this tool was allow users (and charities) to engage with subjects quickly both on an individual level and as a part of the wider community. This particular tool type also helped charities raise awareness of particular subjects and get users to engage with the cause or campaign.
The photo tool utilised much of the native iOS functionality found in mobile devices with some small additions specifically for our product. For example we incorporated a 'hint' that is set as an overlay on the initial photo interface. This could then be turned on and off as needed.
For the draw campaigns we knew that sometimes a blank canvas can be daunting. So, to give users a helping hand we also supplied a number of simple illustrated drawing backgrounds for each campaign. These were designed to be simple enough that users could add to them easily and put there own mark on them but give them a base from which to work.
For us it was vital to reinforce the positive feeling from engaging with these campaigns. We designed a system that allowed the user generated content from each campaign to be shared with the Beneficiaries. To close the loop every user gets feedback from the campaign showing how their contributions have positively affected the beneficiaries and the overarching campaign.
