During my time working for DESIGNATION, one of the projects that I worked on was the design of the request for proposal form. Part of the curriculum of the program involves live client projects, where students work with real startups to gain experience for themselves but also provide pro bono work for startups in our community. 

 

Previously, if a startup wanted to sign up to become a potential student project, DESIGNATION would send them a Google form to fill in general information. I was tasked with the challenge of design a form that captured all the necessary information in a usable way that would then be hosted on the website so that the Google form would no longer be necessary. 

 

I first talked with Dan, the creative director who oversees ad organizes client projects. He was able to tell me the pieces of information that he needed to capture to be able to vet potential startups and determine whether they would make for good student projects. I wanted to ensure the form took away a lot of the work he actually was previously capturing manually through email interactions and captured it within the form.

 

After getting an idea of the necessary pieces of information that needed to be captured by the form, I proceeded to organize it in what I thought would be the most easily understood manner. A challenge that I faced was that a lot of the design terminology that could be confusing to startup owners who typically are not designers. I solved this by rephrasing certain things in layman's terms.

 

I then created wireframes, the visual design and worked with our developer who coded the first iteration of the form.

After our developer created the first interactive prototype, I took it to user testing where the feedback I collected guided the next iterations. I then made edits to the design. The final form can be seen here.

 

Thanks for checking out this project :)