The organization I worked with is called ‘MicroFund’, a micro-entrepreneur platform. The purpose of this platform is to help many organizations around the world run micro-entrepreneur programs. How it works is micro-entrepreneurs apply to the programs and if they’re accepted they receive training, then they have the opportunity to receive a grant from the organization to start their business. They’re provided resources even after they receive the grant.
My team and I intend to solve this problem by providing access and giving micro-entrepreneurs globally the opportunity to easily apply to receive training and a grant for their business ideas. We worked on creating a platform that makes applying to the program easy and accessible. It was overwhelming to inherit a project with technologies I was unfamiliar with but overall it has been a very rewarding experience.
Trials and Tribulations
The overall approach to this project was to institute comprehensive planning and consideration. As a team, we were mindful that our users would be global and very attentively created a wireframe that would be both easy to use and accessible. We created an engineering architecture document showcasing all the plans and overall vision we had as a team with input from our stakeholders and managers.
The Engineering architecture document consisted of an overall technical stack list, how our application interacts as a whole and why we are using this particular technical stack for our application, user diagrams, and flows along with our wireframes.
As a team, we inherited this project from a different team of developers. We decided to keep the same technical stack that the previous team selected. Our team had no prior experience with react query but after a vast amount of research and consideration, it was clear that it was a superior choice for this project compared to other state management tools. React query has extraordinary documentation and it’s incredibly more functional than using redux or other solutions.
We created wireframes that were up to the standard of the stakeholders and UI/UX Designers' vision aesthetically but most importantly with the user in mind first and foremost. The feature I helped implement was the landing page and making the navigation bar and footer sections of the application more in line with the vision of the stakeholder and UI/UX Designer’s vision and the way that users can easily navigate the application.
The technical issue we encountered was with the identity provider *Okta* that was required to be used as our application identity provider. Allowing different types of users to be verified once they’ve reached past the identity provider within the backend was the main cause of this technical challenge.
The team, in addition to members of the other team and managers, have been vast contributors in resolving the technical challenge we encountered.
Although we still face some technical challenges within the team in regards to the identity provider *Okta* causing issues for some team members and leading them to not have access to our application, this has not yet been resolved and caused a significant delay in some of our features.
The Evolving MicroFund Platform
The current state of the product contains:
An improved navigation/header that matches the wireframe more closely.
- We wanted to provide an easy to use and neutral experience for our users.
- It was important that we’d be able to help more than multiple businesses and organizations with this project so it was important to keep the design very neutral.
An improved footer that matches the wireframe more closely.
- The previous design was a green that was not accessible to certain groups and was not neutral so it was redesigned to be very neutral and easy to edit.
Landing page
- To improve the user experience and help explain what this application does and how the process works it was critical to include a landing page with a brief overview of our application.
Sign up page
- Our users are able to sign up and then apply, so we created a sign-up form.
Partner/organization page
- The organization page was created so our users can learn more about the different organizations. They can click and see if the organization is suitable for their needs and tailor the application more carefully towards their future goals.
Improved features for Okta and JWT
- It was necessary to be able to utilize and establish the different types of roles while still utilizing the Okta as an identity provider.
Future Features and Improvements
- Future improvements should include a responsive design and mobile access.
- Documentation for setting up the environment and configurations.
- Some team members were never able to access the application entirely due to the Okta identity provider.
Wisdom and Awareness
Feedback is absolutely critical and I feel that constantly receiving feedback every day helped me and my team improve our communication, improve our skills and really focus on what our common vision and goal established at the beginning to deliver the best features we could deliver in our 4 weeks of working collaboratively remotely.
This project has helped me become a better leader, team player, communicator, improve my programming skills, improve my problem-solving skills and this project helped me learn to solve problems that I didn’t even know needed to be solved. It helped me see the bigger picture in projects and become a better planner. I’m very grateful to have been given the opportunity to contribute to a very important and meaningful project.
