Product Design at Classy: How Creativity and Company Culture Fuel Meaningful Impact

Early in Cherry Lapis’ career, she realized that she enjoyed particular elements of each job she tried, but nothing offered the whole package she was craving. 

At a data company, she loved that her work supported nonprofits in understanding their donors. Her time at a for-profit online education company is where she discovered her love for product design. After five years working at a video technology company, she felt motivated by the collaborative team environment. However, none of these companies had both the culture and mission she needed to feel fulfilled. 

It wasn’t until Cherry started at Classy in 2015 that she found what she was looking for. Classy’s mission to empower the world for good, coupled with its positive working environment and design-forward culture, fueled Cherry with the energy to do the best work of her career. It’s that combination of impact and creativity that continues to drive Cherry on a daily basis. 

We connected with Cherry to learn more about the evolution of her career and her experience as a Senior Product Designer at Classy.

Question: What is it about Classy’s mission and culture that drew you in as a product designer?

A: Classy’s mission to mobilize and empower the world for good really stood out to me. Most people spend a majority of their lives at work, so it was important that the work I did next would be meaningful and use the power of design for good. 

I feel my best and do my best when I'm helping people. It's even better when my team and the customers we serve also share the same goal to do good in this world.

Q: Classy puts intentional thought into its product design to ensure the simplest path to give. What’s an example of a design choice you’ve made to improve the donor experience?

A: During a large research effort that our product team conducted last year, it was apparent that embedded donation forms were highly requested by customers. We’ve also seen increasingly higher traffic to donation pages from mobile devices, so it was important to take a mobile-first approach when designing Modal Checkout.

We wanted to make it easier for donors to move through the donation experience without ever leaving the nonprofit’s website. Given the challenge of fitting a donation form onto the limited space of a mobile screen, we decided to keep form fields to a minimum and group specific inputs in a step-by-step experience. 

Shoutout to the engineers on the project for being able to leverage the existing payment options on our standard donation form and then quickly add PayPal to the list when it was ready for launch! 

Q: What are a few ways that Classy and/or the product design team supports your exploration of new and innovative concepts?

A: My favorite weekly meeting is our Product Design Critique where we present work in progress to get feedback and share ideas. It’s a great space to get visibility and insight from the rest of the team, and to think critically about the way we are solving problems. I come out of those weekly critiques with fresh ideas, inspired to push further and do better.

I’m looking forward to an upcoming internal hackathon that our engineering team will be hosting. It’s a friendly competition to encourage innovation in a fun, relaxed environment. It’ll be great to collaborate and problem solve with people from other departments to showcase our creativity!

Cherry’s work happens behind the scenes, but her innovative designs mobilize nonprofits to fuel their mission with a seamless donor experience. 

View our open roles to join Classy’s movement for good.