Chimp
A barrel of monkey business
Before I went bananas, I worked at Chimp
Short for “CHaritable IMPact”, it’s basically a charity bank account in a web platform that aims to connect people with the causes they care about.
I worked with an agile and cross-functional product team in UX, UI, research, and experience design capacities to inspire these “everyday philanthropists”. With responsibilities spanning the spectrum from strategic planning, prototyping, and user testing to visual design, brand stewardship, and marketing, these are some of the artifacts of my time at Chimp.
Nick transitioned into a role on a full scrum agile team. Designers often struggle with the transition to this regimented and rigorous process. Nick, however, took to this change with enthusiasm and his performance didn't miss a beat.
Clayton Correia VP, Product, Pagefreezer
Onboarding flow
Making metaphors to educate new users in a welcoming way
My colleague and I were given a problem: new users found Chimp confusing. We conducted a design sprint involving members of the client success and marketing teams, developed a prototype of a new onboarding experience, and then performed live user testing. Using data from these tests, we aimed to educate users on the main benefits of a Chimp Account and give them a guided tour through their first charitable gift.
I developed and illustrated visual metaphors to bring these big ideas down to earth, designed the panels, prototyped the animation, and wrote first draft copy on the resulting tooltips.
Marketing site
Communicating the Chimp brand through an external website of photography, custom illustration, and way too many icons
As part of the marketing team at Chimp, I was project lead on the complete relaunch of our external web presence. Working with a project manager, copywriter, photographer, and web developer, we launched 40 new pages that set the tone for Chimp’s brand. From wireframes to responsive layouts and from icons to product illustrations, I was involved in every aspect of the process. The success of this project precipitated my move to a full-time member of the product team.
Search experience
Reworking search so it actually works
As one of the platform’s big legacy features, search is a major component of Chimp but wasn’t working well. Data collected from surveys and the CS team indicated that most people know what they’re looking for, they just can’t get it to return the result. Our usability study also revealed problems with presentation, filtering, sorting, error states, and even the engine that powered the backend.
With this challenge my colleague and I embarked on a project to redesign the search experience, including improving relevance criteria, better handling partial entries and misspellings, auto suggesting results based on commonly searched terms, and showing better context for results.
During the process we developed an interactive prototype and brought in people for live user testing, incorporating our findings into my final responsive designs which I then split out into iterative stories and specs for the dev team.
Community template
Creating a flexible yet sturdy template that works for all users
Chimp launched a new type of group called Communities, a feature that allows companies, brands and like-minded groups of people to collect and amplify their impact together. Since people are invited into these Communities, we needed a flexible yet standard template for a landing page that would explain Chimp while still allowing brands to express their personalities. I designed a responsive template that incorporates banner images, custom messages, and different blocks of content depending on which features the Community offers.
Icon systems
A teeny tiny illustration factory with a massive output
I designed literally hundreds of icons for Chimp over the years, and you know what? I never got tired of it.
Photo editing
Hogwarts-worthy Photoshopping wizardry
Before the rise of AI, cleaning up photography for production was one of those menial but magical tasks that I found extremely satisfying: there’s a clear goal, you don’t have to concentrate on words, and when it’s done it’s done. Accio healing brush!
Movement Pages
Crafting custom client experiences externally
Chimp partners with clients to produce external marketing sites called Movements. These mega campaigns encompass multiple groups, often centre around big events, and can make an immense impact. Connecting with the API for campaign and group data, these are some of the Movement pages I designed and implemented, and here’s a live example.
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Founded an independent lifestyle blog with my friend all about our hometown, and ultimately sold the site to its current curator.
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Progressed through individual contribution and design leadership, transforming the flagship product and elevating the “bananabrand”.
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Previously I led a crackerjack team of designers and researchers as the Director of Product Design at tech centaur Staffbase.
Thanks for visiting my roadside attraction on the information superhighway.
My name is Nick and I'm a product designer by day and a sticker designer by night. Over the course of my career I've cofounded three hilarious children and cried at every Pixar movie.