Role
Designer
Team
4 Designers
1 Project Mentor
Timeline
6 weeks (Fall 2023)
Tools Used
Figma
Awards
Best Prototype
Background
Challenge
Many people struggle to find local volunteering opportunities that align with their interests and career goals.
How might we create a streamlined platform for people to find volunteer opportunities and connect with their community?
Results
Many volunteers aim to find service opportunities that align with their unique interests and goals. In a six week design sprint, our team conducted and synthesized research, ideated, user tested, and prototyped our ideas. Our design focuses on allowing volunteers to find service events tailored to their needs.
This project was completed as a part of Design Interactive's Fall 2023 Cohort. Our project was awarded Best Prototype by a panel of judges.
Research
Competitive Analysis
We began by analyzing five existing volunteer apps to see what they were doing successfully and where their users ran into issues.
Survey
33 respondents
- Unclear task descriptions
- Finding events within a reasonable distance
- User's time constraints
- On-campus clubs
Word of mouth
Social media
Interviews
5 users interviewed
“I’ve had experiences where organizations did not respect my time as a volunteer, which felt frustrating”
“I like to know the time commitment, location, cause, kind of job, what is provided, and who is leading the event”
Synthesis
We organized our research findings into an affinity map and an empathy map to identify the user pain points. We also created two user personas to demonstrate the different needs of potential users.
We also created two user personas to demonstrate the different needs of potential users.
Pain Points
From our synthesis, we identified a few main pain points.
1) Volunteer opportunities are spread out across multiple platforms and lack a single convenient source
2) Volunteers often struggle to fit service events into their busy schedules
3) Volunteers want a way to easily view local events and filter events based on their own interests
Ideation
Solution Sketches
We created sketches of solutions to the pain points we wanted to address.
Allow users to easily find new events from a variety of organizations in their area
Visualize users’ scheduled and saved events
Create a calendar so users can quickly view the dates and times of their events
Recommend events based on each user’s location and their selected interests.
Mid-Fi Prototyping
We created mid-fi wireframes to visualize and outline our features.
User Testing
We tested our mid-fi prototypes with 5 users to adjust and improve our design. We received feedback on our visual design, navigation, and information architecture that guided us through our iterations.
Iterations
The biggest change we made during our iterations was combining our Home and For You pages into one single homepage. We chose to do this because during our user testing we found that the Home and For You pages were very similar which was confusing to users.
We also edited our navigation bar and card formats based on the feedback we received.
Design System
We decided on a decorative font for our headings to make our design look more lively and a simple font for body text.
We chose an otter as our app's mascot. During our research phase we learned that many volunteers participate in service events to give back to their community and to socialize. Since otters are friendly, playful animals that often socialize in groups, so we thought it would be a fitting mascot for our app.
We chose a color palette inspired by colors found in nature to reflect our mascot and because many survey respondents expressed interest in environmental service events.
Final Design
Homepage
Your Activity Tab
Displays saved and registered events
Displays saved organizations
Discover Tab
Recommends events, interest groups, and volunteer organizations
Organization & Event Page
Organization page
Displays a description, location of organization, upcoming events, and recent activity
Event page
Shows volunteer position title, address, time, what to expect, and qualifications
User can register for the event
Messages
Access volunteer event group chats after registration
Search
Displays user's recent searches
Can search by event or organization
Calendar
Displays all registered and saved events
Can view events on a monthly calendar or a daily calendar
User can toggle saved events being visible or not
Users will be alerted if they have registered for two events with overlapping times
Challenges
🗂 Organizing large amounts of information
Our design aimed to consolidate volunteer events from multiple organizations into a single platform. Over the course of many brainstorming sessions and testing, we learned how to prioritize certain pieces of information over others to prevent cognitive overload for users.
🔀 Performing many iterations to create a smooth user flow
In our homepage, we wanted to organize information without making our user flow confusing. After several iterations and layouts, we decided on a flow that we felt was the most simple and which also received positive feedback in our user testing.
🎨 Deciding on a consistent design style
After developing our design system, we found it difficult to integrate our branding in a consistent way across all of our pages. To tackle this issue, we used our mascot to help make our pages feel more cohesive.