Eddi
Maximize federal funding sources and optimize every dollar with AI tools: driving exceptional educational outcomes.
Problem
Districts face significant challenges in managing education funding effectively. Grant guidance is difficult to navigate, while critical data is scattered across multiple systems, making analysis and decision-making time-consuming. Linking needs to evidence-based practices is hindered by limited searchability and understanding of evidence sources. Additionally, districts struggle to track spending, often leaving grant dollars underutilized.
Role
As the only designer on the team, my role was to create brand guidelines, build components, implement user feedback, and help ship out the product with the help of several engineers.
Solution
Eddi connects education funding to student outcomes, streamlining the management of funding streams to save districts and schools time, money, and effort. With an AI-powered platform, Eddi optimizes grant application, allocation, and compliance processes, supports evidence-based solutions, and helps maximize the impact of available funding.
Goals
Understand your data, gain insights, and align priorities with your goals.
Easily engage stakeholders and ensure every voice is heard
Automate reporting and compliance for federal grants and funding.
Who is Eddi?
Watch this quick video to learn more about the live product and why school districts use Eddi.
User Research and Data Analysis
Eddi's target population was straightforward to identify, as we already had interest from school district managers in a platform like ours. To better understand their needs, we created two key journey maps: one centered on the client experience and the other on the federal funding process. These journey maps served as a foundation for interactive interviews with district managers, providing valuable insights into how their federal funding workflows operate.
User Interviews
We conducted biweekly interviews with school district managers—our potential clients—to explore their needs when applying for grants and to assess whether our current designs aligned with their expectations and experiences.
“It’s important to separate student target population like grade level and demographics when creating programs”
- Camden district manager
Information Hierarchy
“Project tracking and budgeting tools are the most impactful when tracking grant dollars”
- CodeVA
“Many of our users aren’t very tech-savvy, so we need a platform that is easy to learn and navigate”
- NYC Department of Education
Given Eddi's complexity as a platform with multiple subpages, it was crucial to establish a clear information hierarchy and implement consistent design guidelines across the entire product.
Ideation and Wireframing
My time at Eddi was far from linear. Designs were sketched and prototyped following user interviews, only to be reimagined and redesigned again. The timeline for developing features varied widely, ranging from days to weeks or even months, depending on the complexity of the challenge.
As more clients join Eddi and user feedback grows, each feature is continuously refined. Eddi is introducing new ideas tailored to meet the diverse needs of school district managers.
Program Manager
The program manager explored around five iterations before finalizing this version. The aim was to create a step-by-step format that minimizes cognitive overload while ensuring all necessary inputs are included.
Needs Assessment
Needs represent the challenges that district managers aim to address, such as improving 8th-grade math scores by 20%. They form the foundation of a program. Users upload files to the needs table, and Eddi AI generates the corresponding needs based on the input.
Organizational Blueprint
Similar to Google Drive, this feature serves as an informational database. All documents uploaded to the platform are stored in the blueprint and automatically tagged with their respective data categories.
Add Task
This overlay has undergone multiple redesigns and reorganizations due to its dependencies. The fields displayed are determined by the type of task being added and any associated information, such as reports.
Reports/Editor and Eddi AI
The concept of the reports/editor is still an ongoing discussion. This feature heavily leverages Eddi AI, using a system of linking tasks (as described above) to create subsections within the reports page. The reports page serves as the final step for Eddi users before the content is exported and shared with other districts for performance comparisons.
Key Features
Tracking budgets
The program manager helps school districts track their spending, compare it to trends, and identify opportunities to better allocate their funds. This ensures that every dollar is used effectively in the right areas.
AI Chat Box
The AI chatbox lets district managers save time by asking Eddi what’s missing from their application or report. Eddi provides the needed information, and users can give feedback by liking or disliking the response, helping the AI improve for future use.
Grant Discovery
School district managers can easily discover and apply for grants directly on Eddi. The discovery page is regularly updated, and with a simple click, users can apply via an overlay. The grant is then added to their dashboard for seamless management.
Organization Management
School district managers often oversee multiple organizations. Eddi makes it easy to manage and switch between school districts, all in one place.
Program Creation Flow
School district managers start by filling out simple questionnaires like the one below, guiding them through key decisions. Based on their responses, they can create programs to support activities like math tutoring, after-school initiatives, or free lunch programs. Once the programs are set up, they can track spending and student outcomes to see where their funding makes the biggest impact.
Managing funds made easy!
Eddi breaks down the process and creates tasks for each grant.
Next Steps:
New clients and increased user feedback mean continuous reiteration
Eddi’s users are generally not tech-savvy so how can we make it an easy-to-learn platform
Implementing onboarding and email notifications
Meeting users needs and business goals/deadlines