Project Context
This project was a 6-week sprint for The Opportunity Project (TOP) 2022 in a collaboration between the US Census Bureau and General Assembly.
Objective: to create a tool to help lower-resourced communities apply for federal infrastructure grants enabled by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) enacted in 2021. Our team chose to work on Broadband Infrastructure grants (Learn more about why we chose Broadband) within the context of the BIL.
Outcome: A web application combining state and federal broadband grants that made finding and applying for grant funding more accessible for governments and organizations lacking grant writing resources. During feedback sessions, user advocates liked the platform's simplicity, which made the grant application process more straightforward and convenient.
The TOP organizers approved the idea to continue further development, and the platform is currently under further development by a different team.
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Timeline
July 2022 - Sept 2022 (6 weeks)
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My Role
UX Design Team lead & UX Researcher
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My Contributions
User Advocate interviews, End-user outreach, Usability Testing, Affinity Mapping, Interaction Design, Project Outline, Standup lead, and Design Studio Facilitator.
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Tools Used
UX - Figma, FIGJAM, Google Drive; Engineering - React, Supabase; Data - Python, PostGreSQL
Process + Methods
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Discover
Understanding the problem and User Research
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Define
Defining the specific problem to solve
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Design
Ideating and designing the platform
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Develop
Prototype, testing, and development
Discover
Research
Goal: To understand how federal grants work, the problems lower-resourced communities face while applying for grant funding, and learn how to encourage them to apply for BIL funds.
Target Users: Lower-resourced state, local, tribal, and territorial governments seeking competitive Federal grant funding.
Research methods
User Interviews and Research Survey
During the first week of this sprint, I talked to user advocates (community leaders who work closely with or belong to the communities we sought to help) to learn about the grant application process for lower-resourced communities and understand their challenges.
We sent out a survey to gather information from people who are hesitant to talk face-to-face and potentially recruit interview participants. These are the insights we got from the interviews and the survey:
of users said
the grant timeline window is very small which leads to alignment issues
lack of resources such as staff and finances as the cause for communities to not apply for grant funding
of users cited
of users wished
for a better way to get notified about new grant opportunities as they arise
difficulty understanding the language & technical requirements of grant applications
of users specified
One of the biggest challenges during this project was learning how federal grants worked for someone with no background in American governance. So part of the process was understanding the grant system alongside learning the user challenges.
Choosing Broadband
After researching the Bipartisan Infrastructure law and learning more about our end users, we decided to focus on Broadband grants as our problem space.
Essentially we believed that helping lower-resourced communities gain high-speed internet access will, in turn, help them gain more accessible access to other resources. Here is an article that informed our decision.
There were several infrastructure areas we debated focusing on, such as Electric vehicle networks, roads & bridges, and so on. I started an internal vote on Slack to decide, and the results of this vote, along with a passionate argument from one of our data scientists, led to choosing broadband.
Comparative and Competitive Analysis
We looked at grant writing services, federal grant application websites, broadband grant websites, and some generic application websites for reference to see what features we could include in our platform and where we could stand out.
Based on the feature inventory above, we realized that having ‘Grant Alerts’ for when a new grant is released could be a place for us to stand out from the competition.
After exploring these websites, one thing that stood out to us was that there was no one website for state, federal, and foundation grants combined. So we wanted to stand out by combining these three, but this presented a challenge data-wise. A significant breakthrough for the data team was figuring out how to pull from state databases, which allowed us to at least combine state and federal grants.
User Persona
Meet Gritty Grant: he is a representation of our target end-user and an amalgamation of our research. We used him as a way to guide our website design.
Define
Our Problem Statement
Under-served (low-resourced) community organizations need more accessible information and guidance through the complex grant application process so that they can confidently apply for grants to help increase broadband access for all.
In order to guide our design studio, I formulated these questions to address the user needs.
How might we…
…Guide community organizations while applying for government grants?
…Inform communities about the available grants to apply for?
…Encourage under-served communities to take advantage of the resources available?
Design
Ideating
We had a design studio with the whole team - a workshop where everyone could draw ideas - to generate ideas for the platform. I drew up a few potential user flows based on our research and decided on one with the help of the UX team, which I displayed during the meeting.
I decided to include the developers and data scientists in the design studio as well, because I felt it would be beneficial to get perspectives from each specialty, despite the difficulty of arranging a meeting this large.
Wireframes
The final idea we agreed on was a quiz to match people with grants based on a couple of questions. It would help match beginners to grants they are most likely eligible for and provide them with the resources to apply. The sketches below are the reference we used to build our low-fidelity wireframes.
We kept our final wireframes simple. A plain white and blue color scheme with the US Web Design System standard fonts and sizes, keeping accessibility for low-resource groups in mind. The wireframes below show our homepage, grant match quiz, and information and resources for each grant listed on our platform.
Testing
We prototyped our wireframes and started testing by the fourth week. We tested at various stages of development with 3 users with expertise in grant applications and 3 without the expertise to balance our results. This is a summary of the feedback we got:
Glows
Grows
↬The onboarding and search are easy to follow, especially for people not well-versed in Grant applications.
↬Clean design and simple language
↬Users liked that they can receive direct grant writing help and get easy access to resources and information.
↬The purpose of certain questions asked in the Grant Match quiz confused some.
↬Asking about their annual budget is important when matching users with Grants.
↬Grant Deadlines are not immediately clear from the initial prototype.
We realized that we were on the right track, but there were still quite a few changes we had to make before our website would be helpful to lower-resourced communities. Below are some screens showing the changes we implemented based on the feedback we received from usability testing.
Develop
Transitioning to a Deployed Website
For a project with a short timeline like this, development had to take place simultaneously with research and design. Hence some of the development had already started before all our research was done, and high-fidelity wireframes were developed afterward.
The development team’s timeline for this project was as follows:
Week 2 → started laying out the framework for the website
Week 3 → developing the wireframes for the landing page and login from the low-fidelity prototype
Week 4 - 6 → developing the rest of the wireframes, adding colors and styles, and iterating based on designer feedback.
I had been so used to the idea that research had to be the first step before starting design and development that I had not realized that in a project like this, we had to work backward in some ways to get our project moving and ensure that all the team members can contribute from the beginning. So, after some discussions, the developers started laying out frameworks before we started designing, and we moved quickly to get some basic wireframes started.
Final Product
Here is a demo of our final website after the testing feedback and feedback from the design team was implemented.
Conclusion
The next steps we decided on through user testing and stakeholder feedback are to build out a new grant alert system further and to add a ‘TurboTax-like’ feature that would further guide users through the grant application process step-by-step. The current platform is under further development by a new team and is under consideration for funding by the White House Bureau of Science and Technology.
Retrospective
I learned a great deal about federal grants, working with data scientists and developers, and prioritizing through working on this project. Next time I know to start talking to the development team earlier to avoid having to rethink design decisions more times than necessary and ensure they are always in the loop. I would also collaborate more with the data scientists, having experienced how closely related their work is to ours.