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UX Case Study
Understanding Walmart Foundation’s Giving Ecosystem
UX Research and Service Design
May 2023 - June 2023 (5 weeks)
Details of my work are confidential. However, here is a glimpse of what I and the team (1 additional designer) worked on for this project.
BACKGROUND
What is Walmart Foundation? What is a Giving Ecosystem?
In 1982, Walmart founded the Walmart Foundation, an internal corporate philanthropic organization, that supports 8+ Giving programs, which are a part of the Giving Ecosystem, to provide monetary support to Walmart associates during times of hardship and non-profit organizations to serve their communities.
Supported by many integrations, there was a lack of shared understanding of the Giving Ecosystem’s current state and how it was all running internally.
The team and I set out to uncover the core processes, tools, and people that supports the Giving Ecosystem. As a result, we delivered several ecosystem and process maps to provide a bird’s eye view of all the program’s processes, tools, peoples, and its integration within the Giving Ecosystem.
OUTCOME
Collective understanding to achieve a shared goal.
The process and ecosystem maps allowed us to have a strong understanding of the Giving Ecosystem’s current and ideal state to inform timely, strategic conversations with our stakeholders and partners to transform the space.
The team and I provided recommendations and strategies on how to transform the Giving Ecosystem that will improve the quality of the programs, enable a better and efficient service delivery for the non-profit organizations and Walmart associates, and improve the internal processes for roles that supports the service delivery.
The work also provided a roadmap of how our UX design team can contribute to improve user experience for non-profit organizations, Walmart associates, and internal roles.
Additionally, for my contribution on this project, I was recognized and awarded with a prestigious Walmart's Making a Difference Award for spearheading operational excellence initiatives within the Giving Ecosystem.
REFLECTION
Lessons learned.
This project was an immense source of professional and personal learnings. My background in Public Health tremendously provided me an advantage because this project required an ability to apply systems-thinking to approach a complex problem and understand the relationships and the systems as a whole.
This allowed me to have a proactive mindset as I explored the factors, relationships, and interaction contributing to potential outcomes for improving the service delivery of the Giving Ecosystem.
Due to time constraint, the team and I were unable to create prototypes of how the ideal service delivery would look like based on our recommendations and test those prototypes to ensure that we were going in the right direction. However, we shared with our stakeholders that additional research would be necessary to validate the recommendations and uncover any potential issues with the ideal state.
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PROCESS
Understanding the Giving Ecosystem and the journey.
There were different processes that non-profit organizations and Walmart associates must follow. To understand the ecosystem, the team and I conducted user and subject matter expert interviews to discuss the front/backend processes, tools, and people’s roles within each program. From these interviews, the team and I created several process and ecosystem maps to review and iterate with our partners and subject matter experts to visualize how the Giving Ecosystem is currently running as an ecosystem.
Through these sessions, we were able to uncover overlapping processes across all programs, areas of inefficiencies within the process, areas of pain points for the roles supporting the programs, and areas of opportunities for improvements within the system.