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Goodnotes App: A Case Study
Personalising the digital note-taking process.
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CURaise Fundraising Management Platform: Fundraising Made Better.
TEAM
3 Product Designers 2 Product Managers 3 Developers
ROLE
Product Designer
TIMELINE
Feb - May 2025 (4 months)
SKILLS AND TOOLS
Product thinking UX Writing Design System 0→1 Information Architecture
BACKGROUND
What is CURaise?
CURaise is a centralized platform built to streamline the fundraising experience at Cornell. With student organizations regularly hosting fundraisers, CURaise aims to simplify the process for both organizers and participants—helping organizers manage promotions, track orders and payments, and analyze performance across semesters, while enabling students to easily discover and support active fundraisers.
THE PROBLEM
How are fundraisers run right now?
The current fundraising process at Cornell is hindered by data overload, scattered information, and sifting through this information is time consuming.
Data Overload
Time consuming
Scattered Data
In addition to data management, the fundraising process is further complicated by the need to coordinate across multiple platforms and applications. Organizers often rely on a combination of tools—such as forms, spreadsheets, messaging apps, and payment systems—which rarely integrate smoothly.
Long long spreadsheets of orders that organizers have to sort through
USER RESEARCH
What are the people saying?
Fundraising involves two main user groups with distinct pain points: participants struggle with poor visibility of events and repetitive ordering processes, while organizers face fragmented workflows across multiple platforms that make fundraisers tedious and error-prone.
Fundraiser Organizers
Organizers struggle with fragmented workflows across multiple platforms, making fundraisers tedious, error-prone, and hard to organize.
Buyers
Participants want to support friends and satisfy cravings, but poor fundraiser visibility and tedious ordering steps often get in the way.
BRAINSTORMING AND DECIDING FEATURES FOR A MVP
MVP Features
A Few Key Features
A fundraiser dashboard for organisers to get quick information about their fundraiser, an analytics page, and a menu style list of goodies for the participants. I was specifically tasked with the organiser’s dashboard so I went straight to work.
INITIAL DESIGNS
What is the first thing that organisers would like to see?
I was tasked with designing the Fundraiser Home Page—the first screen organizers see when they click into a specific fundraiser. Guided by user research and a deep understanding of the organizer’s mental model, my challenge was to answer two key questions:
What would make the most sense for organizers to see first?
What information would be the most useful to them right away?
Based on these quotes from the users...
💸 ”I need to easily track income vs. spending”
This is why all the mockups include a snapshot of the analytics, It was something we kept hearing in user interviews.
📈 ”Success is tracked in different ways.”
This is why all the analytics include different progress bars, showing different trackers of success (total money earned, orders fulfilled etc)
…I made these explorations on what this page could look like.
Exploration 1
Cleaner and neater looking
Missing information on recent orders which may be useful to users
Exploration 2
Information Architecture is clear
Analytics takes up more space than it warrants
Exploration 3
Groups like things together
Many progress bars can be confusing
With these preliminary explorations under the belt, I went straight into the specifics of how specifc kinds of information would be presented on the homepage.
MID FIDELITY DESIGNS AND DECISIONS
What is the best way to organise this information?
Since earnings were organizers’ top priority, I made them the focal point of the page. I tested two visuals: a line graph to track earnings over time and a ring style display to show progress toward a goal; both designed to give a quick snapshot of fundraiser performance.
Total
Analytics Summary
Money Raised
Orders picked up
Time Elapsed
See more
$1000 of $2500
30 of 54 items
50 mins of 2 hours
Linear representation
Users process linear information easier
May be overwhelming for the user to read including all the other linear content on the page
Total
Analytics Summary
See more
of $200 raised
$100
items picked
300
elapsed
1hr
Ring Representation
Less cognitive overload because of visual representation
Information looks neater and cleaner
Linear information may potentially be eaiser for the brain to process
I chose the ring display because it minimized cognitive overload, presented the information more clearly, and made it easy to distinguish progress at a glance.
UX WRITING
Do our titles make sense to our users?
Because fundraising uses specific terminology, we focused on making labels easy to understand. This gave me hands-on experience with UX writing, where small wording changes can shape user understanding. For instance, swapping “Home” for “Overview” clarified that the page contained a summary of key fundraiser details, making navigation smoother.
The title "home" is unclear and confusing
The title "overview" is clear and gives context to what the content will be
LOOK AND FEEL DESIGN
What emotions do we want to evoke with our product?
In discussions with our PM, we aimed for a playful look to balance out the stress of fundraising. I used bright primary colors and rounded corners to convey this, but feedback showed the colors felt overwhelming. This highlighted the importance of finding other ways to add playfulness while keeping the design clean and user-friendly.
Before
Playful vibe
Lots of different colours can feel overwhelming to users
After
Still a playful vibe (with rounded corners)
Sticks to industry standard (one primary color)
PREVIEW THE STORE FRONT
Another important design decision…
We wanted to give users the ability to preview their storefront, which is essentially the things they are selling for their fundraiser.
Users click preview store front and a pop up comes up showing their storefront
The following are some considerations made of where the organisers could preview the store front
Widget with Preview Links
Groups like things together which aligns with user’s mental model
Can be difficult to miss as they are at the bottom of the interface
Secondary Buttons on top
Makes good use of available white space
Requires mental effort for users to read to know what the buttons are for
Links at respective titles
Still makes good use of available white space
Like things are grouped together which reduces friction of going to look for them elsewhere
May be dismissed as unimportant by users since they are only links (as opposed to buttons)
I chose the links at respective titles design because it groups related items together, and I avoided buttons since they might distract users from focusing on key fundraiser details.
Final Product: CURaise Fundraiser HomePage
See how close you are to your fundraiser goals
With the analytics summary, Organisers can track your fundraiser in real time, seeing money coming in, and purchases coming in, so they can make informed decisions about what to do next
DTI
Overview
Analytics
Orders
Sign Out
Cheese Cake Bake Sale
Preview Store Front
Friday, 3/25/2025
Duffield Hall, 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Statler Hall, 11:30: AM to 5:00 PM
Analytics Summary
Total
raised
$100
items picked
300
$50
profit
See more
Recent Orders
Time
Item
Total
14:01
Strawberry CheeseCake
2 x $11.00
$22.00
14:01
Strawberry CheeseCake
2 x $11.00
$22.00
14:01
Strawberry CheeseCake
2 x $11.00
$22.00
14:01
Strawberry CheeseCake
2 x $11.00
$22.00
See more
Fundraiser Form Reminders
Edit Buyer Form
Give your fundraiser a title
Add your financial goals
Add at least one item to your menu
Preview your storefront to see what the buyers see
With the storefront preview, Organisers can see exactly what the buyers see when they visit their storefront, so that they are able to make any changes necessary (eg if a specific product runs out
REFLECTIONS
What I learned from cuRAISING the bar…
Content design is challenging but important.
There was a lot of back and forth on what content to include, how to name features, and how to structure the information architecture. I had underestimated how much thought goes into deciding which features make it into a product. Now, whether a product is feature-heavy or minimal, I better appreciate the decisions and trade-offs behind what’s shown and what isn’t.
What is the most important thing?
Focus on that, and everything else will follow. One of our biggest challenges was prioritization. We had plenty of ideas, like referral tracking, but time constraints forced us to align on what truly mattered for the MVP. In the end, this helped us deliver CURaise’s most important feature instead of trying to do everything at once.
Yes, communication really is everything.
Your therapist, partner, and project manager have probably all said it—but it’s true: clear communication and alignment are essential. With multiple designers working on separate features, we had to sync often to stay aligned, share what worked, and be honest about what didn’t. It was the only way to keep the product cohesive.
shoutout to the CURaise team, it was such a pleasure to be working with you all.
