Financial Oversight
Year
2024
Role
Lead Designer
Ideation
Wire framing
Prototyping
UX Copy
Data Visualization
Partner Teams
Product
Engineering
Marketing
Accounts
Status
Partially Shipped.
In Development.
Timeline
6 months
(Design + Dev)
CREDITS
Parker Crawford
Lauren Ambielli Cardoni
Suz Reahard
Fianna McClain
Joshua Morey
Emmanuel Hidalgo
Austin Herron
Background
Submittable works with over 3,500 federal, state, local, and tribal government agencies and departments. The grants management software (GMS) is used by foundations and governments, to launch, manage and measure their programs of all sizes in a single secure platform.
Challenges and Concerns
The awards and payments functionality did not align with the awarding structures and processes used by grant-makers. It lacked the flexibility and granularity needed to align with the complex financial systems and requirements of grant-makers and grantees, leading to a major functionality gap
Capturing program budgets was treated as a static part of forms submitted during the application process. Unlike static documents, budgets frequently need updates, compliance checks, and links to amount requests, such as reimbursements or advance payments.
Lack of comprehensive tracking of award spending, auditing of award modifications, and advanced reporting capabilities on the platform led to dependency on external tools like Excel templates or inline tables.
Lack of an end-to-end awards and payments functionality offering impacted the sales pipeline, with an estimated churn risk of $9M.and caused pain points for existing customers ($1.7M ATR).
Customer Quotes
“We're lacking the accounting elements that we need. For example, adjusting a grant award through an amendment so it reflects properly from an accounting standpoint.” MJ Murdock Charitable Trust
“I have to track 70 grants, each having multiple budgets, and multiple organizations submitting expenses across those grants and budgets. I have to track alignment across the entire thing”
State of Nebraska
“When we are awarding, we can see everyone’s funds, and it's very easy to accidentally hit a button. It would be great to not have access to other grant teams’ funds. It makes me nervous” Utah Department of Agriculture and Food (UDAF)
Asking Questions
How might we provide an end-to-end awards and payments functionality to our government and foundation customers that aligns with the dynamic nature of funds and budgets in a grant or application lifecycle?
How might we provide customers with a secure and trustworthy financial and data application? / How might we provide organizations with an automated process for complex awards and payment management? / How might we offer a functionality that can be integrated with other financial and payment disbursements tools of their choice with real-time updates? / How might we enable users to easily perform functions that involve Global funds, awards, and payments? / How do we keep the user experience familiar without intimidating our customers while introducing new functionalities? / How might we speak the same language as our grantors and grantees during an awards and payment process and understanding what terminology must not be changed? / How can we seamlessly merge information and functionalities without breaking the current user flow and UI patterns?
User Flow
Laying the foundation: Configuring project settings to set up a program with awards and payments
Explorations
Admin Experience: Project Settings
Enabling a grant maker to configure their project settings so that their awards and payments process better aligns with the structure of their funds distribution.
Easily Creating Budget Categories
A dedicated page to manage and create budget categories for accounting purposes and better assign and track funds to an award
Awards and Payments
Simplifying awards and payments creation, and allowing users to easily modify, delete and track their payments and quickly view funds available.
Data Visualizations for Budget Categories and available Funds
Creating awards and payments using budget categories and keeping a track of funds available and used
Prototype
A dedicated page to manage and create budget categories for accounting purposes and better assign and track funds to an award
Research Methodology
For this project, we started developing this feature from ground up based on existing customer feedback and pain-points and anecdotal evidence gathered by the Submittable sales and customer support teams. However, based on the priorities set by the partnering teams, I was able to collaborate with our UX researcher and conduct quick user validation for testing ideas for various user flows. We conducted live customer interviews to gather qualitative insights and identified areas for improvement, such as navigability, user-friendliness, readability, and better alignment with awards payments structures.
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