SUMMARY
Design Question
How might we not only maintain but enhance the overall volunteering experience for both volunteers and volunteering organizations to better serve the community?
Our Solution
A singular platform to post and search for safe and relevant volunteering opportunities with organizations, manage opportunities, and connect with communities.
Hey, what happened to all the volunteers?
DISCOVERY
Our Initial Research
During a time when connections were difficult to maintain and lifestyles even more so, I found myself detracting from my once-regular volunteering efforts.
As COVID-19 started to cool down and communities were looking to heal, it was clear that the volunteering scene needed some extra love to help support it. By doing some initial research, my team and I found out how communities were impacted by the pandemic and exactly where and how they needed supporting:
Decreased median income
From 2019 to 2020, the median of lower-income households decreased by 3% and of middle-income households by 2.1%
Increased food bank demand
Food banks across the country are serving 55% more people now than before the pandemic
Rising COVID-19-related anxiety
The foremost reason for lack of social issue involvement was discomfort around those who may not be vaccinated against COVID-19.
A deeper dive into out local volunteering community
INTERVIEWS
Though our initial research provided a good starting point to frame our problem statement, we conducted semi-structured interviews to refine our scope and form design goals.
Insights with volunteers
Confusing websites and navigation, especially amongst older volunteers.
Difficult to communicate/ reach out to nonprofits for opportunities.
Volunteers value their health as much as giving; the ability to find balance.
Inconsistent/lack of motivation to initially start the volunteering process.
Insights with organizations
External websites don't have enough personalization or ways to keep connected.
Emailing as a form of communication is exhausting and time-consuming.
Currently hard to track and manage volunteers through social media/emailing lists.
Design Questions
Accessibility
How do we ensure the features and functionalities we provide are accessible?
Communication
How do we establish a reliable means of management and communication for users?
Personalization
How do we provide a customizable experience to cater towards diverse user preferences?
Motivation
How do we help encourage volunteering opportunities to the less motivated user?
To the Ideation Station!
SKETCHING & BRAINSTORMING
From our 4 themes, we ideated ways to integrate personalization and motivation into our solution.
As COVID-19 started to cool down and communities were looking to heal, it was apparent that the volunteering scene needed some extra love to help support it. By doing some initial research, my team and I found out how communities were impacted by the pandemic and exactly where and how they needed supporting:
Personalization
1st Iteration
List structure with a search bar on top
Pills within cards to show relevant filters associated with a listing
Filter button dropdown may be hard to navigate given the many filters that may exist for events
2nd Iteration
Diverse filter options are surfaced directly on the left rail of the page to help users quickly refine their search and emphasize the idea of personalization
Lo-Fi Wireframe
Motivation
When it came to motivation, it took a deep understanding of why people felt unmotivated and what existing platforms failed to offer to encourage users to volunteer.
What are other platforms missing?
A sense of community and long-term involvement
Many popular platforms lack a consistent channel for communication and loyalty to organizations
The ability to volunteer for events without an account
For those who have bursts of motivation, they want to volunteer as painlessly as possibly
Filters for convenient events
A filter which aggregates data to surface quick, non-longterm, fast-approaching events within a local area
Quick giV.
We came up with a feature called quick giV that would have a separate sign-up flow compared to a regular volunteering opportunity. Emphasizing this on our platform helps users capitalize on their sudden motivation before it's lost and easily sign up for an upcoming event.
Less personalized filters to maintain the simplicity of the feature.
No account required to sign up.
Surface same-day events that take an hour or less to take advantage of a user's sudden motivation and free time.
Profile
The user profile and its features:
Engage users in a sense of community and social presence.
Offer avenues for long-term involvement and organizational loyalty.
Open up channels for sustained communication.
Provide users with additional customization and personalization.
Lo-Fi Wireframe
Testing, Validating, and Iterating
USER TESTING
We identified 3 task flows that represented the most important actions to be accomplished for volunteers and organizations.
Tasks
Search for a quick volunteering oppurtunity that is under 2 hours
Upload a volunteering oppurtunity as a member of an organization
Chat with a member of a volunteer organization
We gauged success by asking participants questions and seeing if their answers reflected our goals.
Lo-fi wireframes of our main task flows
Insights
The process to post a volunteer listing is tiring and overwhelming
Step-by-step, 9 screen process
No progress indicator
Users found the journey to be long, tedious and noted that they'd likely drop off in the middle of the process.
After feedback
Streamlined flow with all required steps on a single screen
Reduces CTA clicks from 9 to 1
Ability to save progress to minimize extensive cognitive load
The chat flow is confusing and misaligned with existing mental models
Chatbox could only be selected within an opportunity listing page instead of in a centralized location.
FAQs were not expected to live on this page
After feedback
Rearranged information architecture to allow messages to be findable and tied to user/organizational accounts
Removed FAQs from chat screen
More intuitive breadcrumbing for mental models
Many design elements are inconsistent or lack refinement
Because we tested with lo-fi wireframes, our designs intentionally were left unfleshed as to focus on the raw experience of the tasks themselves. This piece of feedback was still incredibly valuable to us, though, because we became a lot more intentional about principles like whitespace, hierarchy, and balance as we refined our wireframes based on specific feedback on our screens like the homepage or profile.
Home page iterations from lo-fi to hi-fi
Search feature iterations from lo-fi to hi-fi
Profile iterations from lo-fi to hi-fi
FINAL THOUGHTS
I’m grateful for the opportunity to work on a project closely tied to my pre-COVID experiences and relevant to helping our local community. It was eye-opening to hear others’ perspectives on volunteering during the pandemic and the challenges they faced.
Key Learnings:
How to step back from my previous designs to make effective iterations.
How to create a cohesive design system that a team can easily follow.
Challenges Faced:
Consolidating research insights at each phase of the design process.
Occasionally losing sight of the original problem space and goals as the project progressed.
Getting too focused on completing the solution, sometimes at the expense of refining it.