Indochina Starfish Foundation
Empowering nonprofit teams to collect and utilize data through an intuitive form-building system
TIMELINE
May - Sept 2025
TEAM
1 PM, 1 TM, 3 Designers, 4 Engineers, Lu Silverstein, Kimney Nguyen
ROLE
Product Designer
SKILLS
Systems Design, UX Research, Product Thinking, Information Architecture, Prototyping
CONTEXT
Indochina Starfish Foundation is a nonprofit based in Phnom Penh that supports more than 8.5k+ students and families across their education, healthcare, sports, and community programs. In collaboration between Develop for Good and Indochina Starfish Foundation Cambodia, I served as a product designer on this project. Several of my accomplishments included:
THE PROBLEM
As ISF Cambodia continues to expand, they’re struggling to scale their impact without a way to reliably track it
ISF Cambodia relies on disjointed, manual tracking tools such as spreadsheets, paper forms, and group chats. This leads to data silos and reporting bottlenecks, preventing the team from efficiently tracking student progress and demonstrating their impact to stakeholders.
While existing NGO tools offer data collection capabilities, they are often too costly or require advanced technical expertise. Airtable provides a flexible backend, but its reliance on paid licenses for each data-entry user creates a significant financial barrier for the organization. This led us to form our central question:
HOW MIGHT WE
help ISF Cambodia staff centralize data collection and monitor student progress easily to reduce fragmented workflows, improve data accuracy, and enable timely, reliable insights that support decision-making and demonstrate impact?
COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
Existing NGO tools are useful, but not practical for ISF Cambodia’s workflows
To inform our design strategy, we analyzed 4 existing tools commonly used by NGOs to manage field data. Our goal was to understand why these tools were not enough for ISF Cambodia’s workflows and what gaps we could meaningfully address.
Competitors
❌ Key Gaps:
Data is difficult to connect across programs
Tools are too complex for everyday staff
Costs don’t scale well as more team members need access
Workflows aren’t supported (e.g. tasks like multi-record data entry)
✅ Opportunity Areas:
Create a centralized system that work with ISF’s workflows
Need clear, guided interactions
Reduce cost barriers while keeping flexibility with Airtable
Support everyday tasks like pre-filled forms, quick entry, and offline use
Our findings validated our decision to:
SOLUTION
Build a custom web platform powered by Airtable API, giving ISF a centralized and intuitive data management tool without recurring licensing costs.
Our MVP focused on attendance tracking, with scalability to all departments (education, health, social welfare, sports) since information on the students made up the majority of ISF’s data.
Static Intake Forms
Pulls and input data from a single Airtable table within a specific database base
Dynamic Intake Forms
Joins, creates, or manages fields from multiple interconnected Airtable tables across multiple bases
USER INTERVIEWS
Understanding how staff collect and use data revealed pain points in their workflows
Before diving into design, we conducted 1:1 interviews with ISF staff, such as teachers, coaches, and administrative managers, to understand how they currently collect, manage, and use data in their day-to-day work.
The Goal: uncover where pain points occur in the data collection process and identify what prevents staff from confidently recording and accessing information.
Organization managers 📋
Oversee overall operations & compile stakeholder reports
Teachers ✏️
Facilitate educational programs & track daily attendance
Outreach Representatives ⛑️
Conduct field visits to track community health, student well-being, & support families
Tedious Attendance Tracking Process
Teachers record attendance on paper & send a picture to a group chat. Then, the administrators manually record absences.
Long Delays in Data Availability
Whenever outreach representatives need data to present to donors, they need to wait as long as 2 weeks for checking.
Struggling to Measure Student Outcomes
Organization managers can’t easily monitor student performance over time and observe whether the program supported their growth.
Key Insights 💡
Additionally, we identified two main user groups and workflows:
Primary
Admins
Create data collection forms for operational staff
Define forms
Define database structure
Manage form history & submissions
Secondary
Staff
Interact with students to collect data with the forms
Record student and performance metrics
Edit incorrect entries
Update information in the database
This distinction is important because our main two user groups had different workflows. Admins needed static intake forms for more structured processes such as student enrollment or family surveys, while staff needed dynamic forms in order to log attendance and performance data for multiple classes.
IDEATION
Brainstorming time! 🧠
Now that we had a clearer picture of our product’s core functions, I helped lead a brainstorming session with the team to explore other key considerations, such as how to make the form creation process intuitive for staff with varying levels of experience.
We had many other ideas that unfortunately was out of the scope of this project!
Ultimately, our team settled on two additional features that would help staff with their workflows. We decided to add a preview option so that users can see how their choices affect the form visually. We also decided on templates so that staff can quickly create forms for repetitive use cases and reduce friction by having to create a new form from scratch each time.
USABILITY TESTING
Validating workflow alignment and form creation logic
After we prototyped a MVP, we shared our designs with 10 participants (5 internal ISF staff, 5 external users) to see how users interacted with the product. We wanted to see if our form creation logic made sense and helped staff with their workflows.
We worked with Kimney Nguyen, an experienced UX researcher, to help us conduct this study objectively and unbiased. Thank you for all your help!
From our usability tests, many users said that the software was generally intuitive, felt more confident collecting data and using the tool, and they liked the preview option. However, there were 3 main patterns where users struggled:
ISSUE #1
“Sometimes I don’t want to see the preview.”
ISSUE #2
“Some of the terminology is confusing.”
ISSUE #3
“I don’t understand the Field Mapping step.”
ITERATION
At this stage, I focused on refining the form builder flow by introducing guided steps, clearer hierarchy, and visual indicators to help users understand how their data connects across the system. Key iterations included making the preview feature optional, adding contextual definitions for technical terms, and redesigning the field mapping experience to better communicate relationships between data.
FINAL DESIGNS
After many iterations and hours meeting with our client and the development team, we refined our prototype and presented our final designs on demo day! We got valuable feedback about our work and presentation skills from Bloomberg professionals.
THANK YOU FOR MAKING IT TO THE END! :)
Reflections & Learnings 💭
As someone who is passionate about social good, especially in education, this project was so incredibly rewarding and it was amazing seeing how my work could make an impact. Additionally, this was my first 0-to-1 project & I took away several key learnings:
✍️ Turning the complex into clarity
This project was very complex and we had so many meetings with our stakeholder discusses the underlying logic of the form building flow. I had to learn quickly how to navigate messy, interconnected systems and translate them into experiences that feel intuitive and approachable, especially for users who aren’t the most tech-savvy.
⚽️ Design is a team sport
This project was also my first exposure to cross-collaboration across many different people with various experiences and backgrounds. Working closely with my managers and the development team showed me that the best solutions come from collaboration, where feasibility, constraints, and design all shape each other.
💪 Good design helps people feel capable
I learned that good design isn’t about making decisions for people, but guiding users to make those decisions for themselves. It’s important to make users feel supported and confident throughout the entire process.