Considerations by Daniela B.

What is Life Beautified?

“Life Beautified is a non-profit organisation aiming to help students save for secondary education through affiliate marketing.Their website connects to their 529 savings plan so any item purchased through a student's account will have a certain percentage go towards their secondary education plan.” Lauren Stanton, UXD Team Lead Phase 1 & Phase 2

“The client idea is to collect funds for the users who would need a fund for their future college education. Right from when they are kids, their parents can start purchasing products and the fund they are generating are going straight to their 529 account and saved in there until they turn 18 or until they go to college, where the funds can be used for their college education. In the whole process there are: the client’s website, a product website like can be Nike and a third party in between. So the customer is going to purchase through the Nike page where they would enter a code to get the funds transferred to a third party; then the third party would transfer them into the 529 account. The funds are not going to go in the life beautified account but right straight into their 529 account.” Neha Agarwal, ****Tech Fleet Project Coordinator following Life Beautified project

Rundown/Agenda

• Team temperature check with leads
• Outline challenges from Phase 1
• Understand general direction for Phase 2
• Questions for Neha* She is currently trying to schedule a meeting with the client, also to discuss NDA* and bring more clarity on that and more to us (f.e. if shadowers are allowed to join considering the NDA)

Challenges and Notes from Phase 1, to be improved for Phase 2

• More organisation and a centralised system to access information in an easy and fast way (Notion, Figma, Zoom as decided platforms)
• Not all people are familiar to Notion: an onboarding on the tool is welcome
• Slack has the challenge that after 90 days messages will be deleted: keep in mind future needs is key. Also making sure to share all files with all teams (some members are now struggling recover some old files)
• Rebalancing and reinforce the value of stand ups is important to bring all teams together. During this meeting we discussed how to schedule recurrent activities like stand-ups. Between the proposals:
• Monday recap/refresh of previous week
• Retrospective on Friday
• Mid week stand ups
• Asynch stand ups: three teams on Monday, three other on Tuesday etc
• Leads meeting on Tuesday
• Research took a while in Phase 1 to get the ball rolling: research in Phase 2 should gain momentum quickly, starting at the beginning of the phase. We might need to re-do surveys as the ones in Phase 1 got infiltrated by bots and there were troubles also with finding users to interview due to pressure. Research was overall limited in Phase 1 (more assumptions than actual research), bringing challenges and uncertainties also to Design to develop further.
• Achievements from UXD: being able to get the sign up flow going and seeing more project colleagues from phase 1 wanted to join Phase 2. UXD is looking for a feedback from the client on the design so that they can start iterating and design more.
• Achievements for Strategy: Glossary for ensuring the team was on the same page