Pathway for greater grants management

Altum’s grant management software provided its users with some of the most robust functionality available; however, it’s user experience made it difficult to use day to day. Their clients were beginning to consider switching to competitor solutions. Altum has big dreams as thought leaders, but they had a tight budget and an outdated tech stack that limited the amount of changes we could make at once. Their system lacked consistent styling, even within its frontend implementation, making it difficult to make even simple global changes.

My role was essentially equivalent to a UX consultant or in-house employee. I learned the ins-and-outs of their platform, their user needs, and helped them to prioritize which efforts needed to be implemented first. I helped them paint the picture for the future, but gave them realistic steps for how we could work towards those end goals. We focused on releasing small updates to essential parts of the system, such as navigation, a budget feature, and new grant creations. This improved user's daily experiences and rebuilt user trust and even gained Altum a major client donation to support more updates!

Altum was constantly releasing new features to better serve their users needs, so it was nearly impossible to fix their entire system while also keeping up with their new releases. It was equally important to me that I was teaching them UX best practices so they could be making better decisions from the start. This also helped conversations to be more efficient and align the whole team better.