Context

Managing nationwide grants programs with limited resources, legacy apps and disconnected manual workflows result in problems like duplicate entries, incomplete payments, grueling manually verifying applicant identities and tracking physical applicant evaluation sheets. Furthermore, for art grants, some applicants lack computers thus having to rely on cyber cafes and also struggle to articulate their artwork descriptions in English.

Foundations urgently need a streamlined, accessible administrative platform to capture and process grant entries without collapsing under operational friction.

Requirement

A platform redesign and technical workflow strategy is needed.

Discovering the existing administrative pain points, mapping out a frictionless user journey for artists, building a functional back-end to eliminate manual data handling, and delivering a high-fidelity interactive experience.

Solution

To eliminate manual data entry, a rapid proof of concept application automatically parsed incoming application’s data fields and generated clean, formatted, and ready-to-use artwork grading sheets for jury process.

Researching the user base resulted in a highly simplified, language-accessible application flow. A rapid generative UI design process eliminated manually building every button, input field, and menu layout over the course of a week and resulted in an interactive hi-fidelity prototype in a day’s time.

A UX research phase was conducted to address the distinct limitations of the artist applicant pool. The entire application ecosystem was wireframed, mapping out a highly simplified, intuitive user journey. This design removed complex jargon, reduced form steps, and optimized layouts specifically for easy navigation by users with lower digital literacy.

Outcome

A complete video demonstration of the interactive prototype to visualize the final system. The platform architecture offers a highly cost-effective engineering blueprint. Once fully deployed, the system is designed to drastically scale capacity to thousands of applicants while freeing internal administrators from manual paperwork.