Helping Feeding America engage young professionals through a seamless, social digital donation experience.
Role: Experience designer — research, ideation and prototyping
Team: Academic team and client partners
Timeline: Semester-long design engagement
Client: Feeding America
Scope: Research-driven concept design, prototyping and evaluative research
The Challenge
Feeding America needed a digital interaction that would cut through noise, appeal to young professionals, and make donating feel easy, social, and integrated into their everyday digital life.
Context & Constraints
Ambiguous, open-ended client brief required team scoping
Target audience (young professionals) lacked existing tailored solutions
Solution needed to balance simplicity with social connection
Academic project with iterative peer and client review loops
My Role & Ownership
Led research synthesis, concept generation, feature exploration, and prototype development; drove user testing and design revisions based on qualitative insights and concept performance.
Key Decisions
Targeting Young Professionals
We narrowed scope from a broad brief to focus on young professionals — a segment with growing financial independence but minimal targeted donation experiences. Research (competitive audit + interviews + card sorting) guided this decision.
Seamless, Social Donation via Venmo
We chose to integrate within Venmo because it offered a familiar mobile context, social visibility, and friction-free transactions — all aligned with user insights (desire for effortless interaction and social proof).
The Solution
VenmoMeals: A seamless digital donation interaction embedded in Venmo that makes donating to Feeding America easy, social, and engaging.
Key interaction concepts included:
A Feeding America Venmo profile for visibility
Round-up donations to lower barriers
Invite friends and collective donation options
Multiple points of entry across the interaction
These were fleshed out through sketches, user stories, Figma prototypes, and iterative testing.
Main features
Round up
Invite friends to donate
Feeding America Venmo profile page
Entry points
Feed payments from friends
Recipient suggestion
Round up
Ad in feed
Push notifications
Outcomes & Impact
Delivered a research-backed concept grounded in user motivations
Prioritized three core features for client presentation: Round-Up, Invite, and Venmo Profile
Surfaced compelling impact hypotheses for both Feeding America and Venmo — including projected donations (e.g., simplified donations could unlock hundreds of millions of additional giving by leveraging Venmo’s user base)
Reflection
This project deepened my ability to synthesize research into high-impact interaction concepts and showed the importance of aligning user insights with platform context (e.g., doing charity interaction where people already live digitally).