I consulted for almost four years at the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund (www.charitablegift.org), an independent public charity which encourages philanthropy by providing programs that make charitable giving simple and effective. Their main product is the Giving Account^®, a donor-advised fund program where donors contribute to the Gift Fund and then recommend grants to be distributed to qualified nonprofit organizations.

I used my web design & Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) expertise to play a major role in enhancing both the look and functionality of the product up to "Web 2.0 standards". This work was done in phases over the course of a year and a half and included:

• Standardizing the implementation of the legacy screens so that a consistent "look-and-feel" could be established.
• Working with the Director of Website Management to turn the web designers' concepts into a real-world implementation that could be systematically applied to the interface by the application. I ultimately created a User Interface Style Guide to both document what was implemented and to guide future development.
• Providing a dynamic architecture to replace the static "home screen" with a multi-tabbed interactive dashboard that provides highlights of the data from all corners of the application in a central place. Adopting this dynamic architecture eased implementation of the interactive components and minimized bugs thereby reducing the initial cost. It has also already proven to reduce ongoing costs by allowing new content, and even entire screens, to be added or removed with minimal effort.

You can see this work in motion by clicking the "Online Demo" link at the right.