Ek Aur Ek Gyarah!

EkAurEk started out as a Response to Covid 19 by Asar, Rootbridge, Socratus & a team of Volunteers. The collective’s intent was to brainstorm ways to help Citizens affected by Covid using the combined capacity of their orgs. Ekaurek emerged out of this brainstorm. Ekaurek’s goal was to build a website that enables direct cash transfers, & later open-source the documentation.

KICKOFF & RESEARCH

I started with observing websites of other non-profits, going through interviews of Designers at non-profits and lastly studies around the state of Design in the non-profit space. I noticed that good non-profit sites had an easy to understand and clear mission statement (like Zomato’s Feeding India), they had well-crafted narratives and moving storytelling (as advised in this interview) and payment flows that people are familiar with (as highlighted in this report). I used Notion to document all the research so that later it can be useful for group consensus building.

EXPERIENCE PRINCIPLES

Once I had responses to my enquiries and curiosities, I formed their combinations into a set of Guiding Principles for our platform UX. It also turned out to be a great design artifacts to build group consensus and drive design work smoothly.

CONCEPT MODELLING

A Concept Model serves as a great communication device for team activities. It is also a great thinking device for designers. When I started to look for a way to capture the essence of a visitor, I found my answer in Slow Design for the Anxious World by Jeffrey Zeldman. I felt no visitor would hurriedly decide to donate to Ekaurek, it’ll be a slow organic decision. So we should offer information in a concise, modular, transparent manner & let them spend time on the site. Design for a slow audience, not a fast one.

PROTOTYPING

I was clear that the experience should be slow, built around a mission & clearing people’s doubts. So I stitched UI components and messaging to create the wireframe for the landing page. Through discussions with stakeholders, we froze key strategic options for the project on the prototype. Key decisions like doner’s term of commitment, positioning were taken with the help of the prototype.

VISUAL DESIGN

For Visual design phase, we had Guru and Smriti from REDD join us. After a few rounds of iterations, we got a sign off on the design. During this process, I also learned that giving feedback is the most important skill if you are managing design. In an exploratory phase, you'll have to make space for freedom. As the team starts narrowing towards 1 solution, highly directed and clear feedback takes the solution from a draft to the final stages quickly.

DEVELOPMENT

Post visual design, Sumanth from REDD developed the site as close to the design. They also did a great job of changing the site into blocks on a CMS so that future changes can be done by the design team itself within a matter of minutes.

CURRENT STATUS

Ekaurek is currently under a Pilot phase. We have a few donors mostly friends and family. The cash is sent to a couple of beneficiaries who were identified in our network orgs. Marketing campaigns are being run to increase the number of doners.

I left the project in Nov ‘20 because of other commitments.

If you like Ekaurek, why not contribute to the mission?