Context

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The Prafulla Dahanukar Art Foundation (PDAF) manages an extensive annual grant program, distributing roughly 7 lakhs in financial aid to emerging artists across India. The internal administration of this massive nationwide program rested almost entirely on a single Program Coordinator operating through an archaic, basic web portal, leading to duplicate entries, incomplete payment processing, and a grueling manual process to verify identities and compile evaluation sheets. Crucially, the applicant pool faced serious usability barriers; many rural creators lacked personal computers or high digital literacy, forcing them to travel to local cyber cafes to navigate complex forms, while English language barriers frequently prevented non-native speakers from clearly articulating their artwork descriptions. Having recently canceled their contract with an inadequate software provider, the foundation urgently required a streamlined, accessible administrative platform architecture to capture upcoming grant cycle entries without collapsing under operational friction.

Requirement

I was brought in to assume complete ownership of the platform redesign and technical workflow strategy ahead of a high-stakes board presentation. I was tasked with auditing the existing administrative pain points, conducting accelerated user research to map out a frictionless user journey for low-literacy creators, building a functional backend proof of concept to eliminate manual data handling, and delivering a high-fidelity interactive prototype under an aggressive 24-hour deadline.

Solution

To immediately demonstrate system feasibility during the project pitch, I bypassed complex database setups and built a lightweight automation backend using Google Apps Script. This script targeted the coordinator’s most tedious bottleneck by automatically parsing incoming applicant form fields and instantly generating clean, formatted, and ready-to-use grading sheets for the evaluation jury, proving manual data entry could be entirely eliminated. Next, I conducted a rapid UX research phase to isolate the technical constraints of rural creators and sketched out a radically simplified application ecosystem directly onto physical whiteboards. This layout removed technical jargon, reduced multi-step forms into simple progressive disclosures, and minimized text-heavy inputs in favor of prominent, visual icon markers. To meet the near-impossible presentation deadline, I skipped traditional manual asset creation and executed a rapid generative design process inside Figma. I used the structural whiteboard sketches directly as visual prompts for Figma’s generative UI engine, translating raw wireframes into polished, high-fidelity component layouts using just three targeted text prompts, allowing me to compile a comprehensive, fully interactive web application prototype in less than 24 hours.

Outcome

The rapid delivery of a complete video demonstration showcasing the interactive prototype and automated grading script earned immediate, unanimous support from the foundation’s trustees. The functional prototype effectively replaced the failed legacy vendor roadmap, allowing the organization to pivot away from administrative overhead. This ongoing initiative provides a highly cost-effective engineering blueprint that safely reduces the foundation’s dependency on manual labor, streamlines payment and identity compliance, and scales their annual candidate capacity to comfortably support thousands of underprivileged creators across the country.