Simplicity has always been one of our core values for Donor Tools. Keeping it simple while packing in powerful features and functionality were challenging! The temptation is always to add more than we need. Here’s a glimpse at the past year of Donor Tools, showing how we approached some of the design problems.
Our first design: I always knew that we wanted to keep the data very close to the top of the page, so we decided from the beginning to put as much meta-data and navigation in the sidebar.
Design Two: We were experimenting with putting all the navigation in the right-hand sidebar. It’s a nice solution because theoretically we could have added as many navigation items as we wanted, and the sidebar could grow to accommodate it. The danger of course was that we would go crazy with adding new navigation items, and the app would become impossible to navigate.
In the long run, we decided to embrace the constraints provided by horizontal navigation. The limited horizontal space would force us to be creative. We decided on four navigation items: Dashboard, Donors, Donations, and Reports. This freed up the entire right-hand sidebar for meta-data and button controls.
We decided to move the sidebar to the left side of the screen. This promotes a deliberate left-to-right workflow. We also lost the “Reports” tab, since every page in Donor Tools is a report, it felt redundant.
In the “Smooth Green” design, we moved everything up a few pixels and shrank the page header. We also moved the “settings” link to its own tab; there was a lot of functionality hiding behind a tiny little “settings” link, so we felt it deserved more prominence.
We refined and tweaked the design until it felt “finished”. Here’s how it looks today:
