Personas and the challenge

Design a scalable, intuitive platform that supports multiple user types with distinct goals, while delivering a cohesive and engaging experience across the ecosystem.

The platform needed to serve five different user groups, each with unique motivations, behaviours, and pain points—requiring four role-specific dashboards that balance jobs to be done with system-wide consistency.
 

Key UX challenges included:

• Designing for the user groups: financial managers, enterprise leaders, employees, charities, and platform administrators

• Ensuring each user could quickly understand what actions they could take, what impact they were making, and what mattered most to them

• Reducing cognitive load while managing complex permissions, budgets, and workflows

• Creating visibility into individual and organisational impact, without overwhelming users with data
   

Compounding this challenge, the existing legacy platform was non-scalable, difficult to navigate, and not built to support future technology enhancements. Poor usability and limited feedback loops meant employees struggled to engage meaningfully or see the value of their participation—both individually and as part of a larger organisation.

The UX challenge was to simplify complexity and design for scale.