End-to-End Application
Solo project. Research, define, ideate, design, prototype, and iterate.
Formal volunteering involves helping others through organizations and includes activities like supporting public health efforts, supporting food banks, and tutoring students to help them stay on track in school. More than 28 percent of Americans—more than 75.7 million people—formally volunteered for an organization between September 2022 and 2023. In total, these volunteers served an estimated 4.99 billion hours with an economic value of $167.2 billion.
https://americorps.gov/about/our-impact/volunteering-civic-lifeWhile formal volunteering rates dropped from 2019 to 2021 in every demographic group, informal helping rates largely remained steady. Trends in formal volunteering 2019-2021:
Many people struggle to find volunteer opportunities that speak to their interests or schedule. Many volunteer opportunities/positions require big commitments of time and/or labor, both physical and emotional.
Create a mobile application to match users to volunteer opportunities that suit their interests and work with their schedule.
My initial idea was to create an application for a laundromat. I hope to own a laundromat one day and wanted to start learning about the industry, maybe even help out an existing laundromat. I did my competitive analysis and prepped my interview questions. However, when I canvassed at two separate laundromats, everybody I spoke to said that they didn't need anything. One person even said, "It's perfect. I come, I do what I need to, and I go home. If a system works, it's perfect."
Well.
If there's no problem, there's nothing to solve for. Rather than find more people to interview for a project that already had a false start, I chose to pivot. What was another group of users I could rustle up?
After a helpful talk with my mentor, I got together a group of retired users with the goal of creating an app to help them keep up a healthy habit. I just had to find out which habit or habits most of my retired users needed help maintaining. I did a competitive analysis to help me come up with my interview questions. It turned out that all of the retirees I interviewed were doing a very good job of taking care of themselves, from exercising to socializing and drinking enough water to eating well. It was time to pivot. Again.
Since I already had all of these users' contact information, I was determined to find a problem that was affecting these users. If I could ask broad enough questions, I could narrow in on at least a few issues that were plaguing all of them. I could do the rest of my preliminary research once I knew where my project was heading. After two interviews, I had my idea: an app to match users to volunteer opportunities. I knew I could pursue this idea because all of them had mentioned volunteering in some capacity or another in my previous round of interviews. I interviewed everyone again with volunteering as my focus and then I found another user in high school to get a different perspective. Finally, I had a problem to solve!
My approach was conversational, allowing for follow-up questions and open dialogue to help participants feel comfortable and encourage deeper insights. In that vein, I focused in on what users did for volunteer work. "What do you like about what you do to volunteer?" "How has volunteering changed your life or perspective or outlook?" "What challenges have you faced?" "How do you stay motivated to keep going back?" "How did you find your organization?"
Some of my users were not currently volunteering so different questions were necessary. These were people who wanted to volunteer – every one of them had said so – so what was stopping them? "What are you looking for when volunteering?" "What would make you stop volunteering with an organization?" "What would draw you to an organization?" "Why do you want to volunteer?"
“It’s hard to work with volunteers and volunteer groups, you know some of these people have never worked a day in their life. It’s not the same as if it’s their job.”
One participant mentioned that her friend decided to become the president and got fed up. The friend said, “I didn’t know how difficult these people could be.”
A lot of volunteer opportunities require a lot of commitment, especially when they involve helping children: "Like a kid needs your help and then you’re stuck.”
“Sometimes it’s hard to find the time.”
“I think the challenge is to find more opportunities to spend more time to make a difference.”
People who already volunteer are doing things they like: e.g. working with power tools or flowers.
“I do it because it makes me more compassionate, I get to try new things, learning to adapt and get out of my comfort zone.”
Some nonprofits have a Google doc or sheet for signing up for specific days, others have specific software.
To make sure I was getting a broad perspective on the different competitors offering to connect nonprofits with volunteers, I chose three direct competitors with different audiences and one indirect competitor. VolunteerMatch offered a non-religious perspective, while Points of Light had Christian undertones. Both sites offered religious nonprofit opportunities, but Points of Light much more so. Volunteero was not based in America, but in the U.K.. What was different about volunteering in the U.K.? Did they want to know different information before they signed up?
I chose LinkedIn as an indirect competitor because their whole business model is based on matching users to opportunities, job opportunities rather than volunteering ones, but the basic concept was the same. What methods did they use to facilitate that?
Volunteermatch.org
Website for filtering volunteer opportunities
engage.pointsoflight.org
Website for filtering volunteer opportunities
UK-based app for filtering volunteer opportunities
Indirect Competitor
Website (and app) for filtering job listings
To synthesize my findings and prepare to develop personas, it was time to use problem statements in the form of "Point of View" statements and "How Might We?" statements to refine the direction of the project. If the users are children, safety is the highest priority. But it's not just children's safety that is priority – any product should consider their users' safety. Children might need transportation, but so might retirees. So while each type of user had their own issues, there was definitely some overlap.
Annalisa, a busy high school student, needs to meet her NJHS volunteer quota while relying on other people for transportation and remaining in safe environments so that she can broaden her horizons while paying it forward.
Greg, a retired IT analyst, needs to stay active and find a volunteer activity he enjoys, because he needs to keep up his health and has had some bad experiences with chaotic volunteering opportunities in the past.
Since I had two different kinds of users to accommodate, I needed a persona for each: one for retirees and one for high school students. The retirees persona addresses concerns about scheduling since many of my users said they had plenty to do while retired and a lot of volunteer opportunities didn't allow for flexibility or physical limitations. The high school student persona addresses the needs of minors who want to volunteer: they need to be in safe environments, fulfill certain requirements for graduation or extracurriculars, and, similarly to a lot of retirees, needed to schedule around other obligations, mainly school.
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After talking with my users, analyzing their feedback, doing a competitive analysis, and researching what nonprofits look for in volunteers, I had a lot of feature ideas. I took a short amount of time to write down these features and give some context for what they would do or how they would work, and where I got the inspiration.
One of the ones I latched onto the most was sharing a profile with the nonprofit, similar to how LinkedIn offers the ability to quick apply for jobs. The user pre-fills out a resume and instead of re-entering all that information for each job they apply to, they can click quick apply and send their resume. The research I did on how volunteer organizations pick their regular volunteers led me to some of the questions asked in the survey at the tail-end of the onboarding flow outlined below.
LinkedIn was the only organization in the competitive analysis to have filters that stayed in place for repeat visits. For the others, even Volunteero which requires an account, the filters had to be reapplied on each visit, no filters accounted for scheduling, and while there were often filters for interests, there weren't any for skills the user already possessed or skills the user might want to practice or learn.
This led me to the create an onboarding flow, one that would allow the user to pre-filter opportunities based on their availability, interests, and skills. Some things my users said in their interviews also sparked ideas for filters like socialization level and activity level. These could be tags nonprofits could put on their opportunities listings. All answers to these filter and following survey questions could be changed from the user's profile in case they were no longer accurate. The second flow is finding and signing up for an opportunity, because that's the whole point of the app.
The flows are a bit unwieldy to be placed here. To see them, please follow the link below.
The screen that I sketched many different ways was the day/time availability page. I wanted to provide options that were comprehensive but not overwhelming. I ended up with weekdays split into 6 approximate time slots. While it would be difficult for organizations to list opportunities that lined up precisely with user's availability, it would at least give the matching algorithm an estimate of the time commitment each user could devote.
Before moving into mid-fidelity, I asked for some feedback on my sketches, specifically the Day/Time Availability screen. I wanted to see if the layout I considered to be the most intuitive and straightforward was intuitive and straightforward for others. With my Day/Time Availability layout confirmed, I was able to make some of my layouts more clear and then I started on my mid-fidelity mock-ups.
I focused on the busiest screens first. Since the Day/Time Availability, the home page with the opportunity cards, and the Opportunity and Nonprofit details screens were the most complicated, it was necessary to devote more time to ensuring their clarity. These were the screens that I needed to test for understandability.
Mid-Fidelity Day/Time Availability Screen
Mid-Fidelity Home Screen
Mid-Fidelity Opportunity Details Screen
Mid-Fidelity Nonprofit Information Screen
To catch any oversights early, I asked five users to:
Four out of five users took the whole survey, which I didn't expect. It's necessary for the optimal flow since it filters opportunities shown to the user and provides information to nonprofits in search of return volunteers. To alleviate any potential frustration, I gave users the option to bypass the survey entirely. I included the second half of the survey to account for volunteer opportunities that require commitment, assuming that at least half of my users would opt for one-time opportunities. Having the answers to the open-ended, regular commitment questions in the user's profile would mean they could avoid having to answer those questions later on, which was stated.
Overall, though, there didn't seem to be anything that confused the testers as most of them blazed through both flows. Aside from a prototyping error I managed to diagnose and fix before high-fidelity testing, each user did the two flows slightly differently and had disparate notes. Here's what they had to say:
I gathered inspiration and found that nearly all the logos for volunteer organizations featured hands. Hands everywhere. Reaching up, making hearts, hands clasped, making fists. And the color palettes were most blues with bright orange-reds as the accent color. At first, I thought I might want my branding to feel similar, but as I experimented with color combinations and logos involving hands, I found myself feeling stuck. I felt like I wasn't being original and that's because I wasn't. So I pivoted.
I wanted the app to be calming but cheery, the logo distinct but able to be shrunk to fit on a mobile screen and still recognizable. After experimenting with color combinations, I shifted the widely used blue/orange-red palette to a minty green/yellow/orange/medium blue palette. The orange didn't quite reach the highest of contrast standards, so I used it more for decoration than for UI elements with a prescribed purpose. For the logo, I eschewed hands altogether. They wouldn't scale well, but the font I chose for Headers 1 and 2 was legible yet fun and made a great wordmark logo, with a little circle decoration to make the "T" look like a person.
Main update from mid-fidelity:
Pre-Iteration Home Screen Card Menu
Updated Home Screen Card Menu
I didn't update much from mid-fidelity. Since the participant who commented on the wording of the questions used to be an editor, I took their suggestions. But the user who insisted there was too much information on each page was an outlier and all the information included in each page needed to be present for comprehension. I also evaluated whether to include an "Edit My Profile" button on the Share My Profile screen. While it could have offered a convenient shortcut, adding this feature would have required designing a full profile editing flow. Given the project’s focus and timeline, I chose to prioritize core functionality to ensure a high-quality experience where it mattered most. Additionally, because the bottom app menu includes access to the profile, users can still heart an opportunity, navigate to their profile to make updates, and then refer back to their liked items. This allows for flexibility without overextending the scope.
Future usability testing could further evaluate whether including an "Edit My Profile" option directly on the Share My Profile screen adds meaningful value to the user experience.
Pre-testing high-fidelity screens:
Day/Time Availability Selection Screen
Home Screen
Opportunity Details Screen
I asked 6 users to:
Since mid-fidelity testing didn't result in major changes, only a few aesthetic choices on my part, I wanted to test those. I moved the card menu to the side and made it smaller. Would this hinder anyone? Had my attempt to be cool sabotaged the find-and-apply-for-an-opportunity flow? As you can see from the second bullet point below, it did. Not badly, but enough to cause hesitation from every user.
Stats:
User Observations/Suggestions:
Updates:
Pre-Iteration Home Screen
Updated Home Screen
Pre-Iteration Opportunity Details Screen
Updated Opportunity Details Screen
Pre-Iteration Open-Ended Question Screen
Updated Open-Ended Question Screen
All updates were made in the name of clarity. Users were able to make it through every flow, but there were hesitations and questions with every one of them. I tested these updates with two more people to make sure my choices hadn't done the opposite of what I wanted and both users blew through faster than any of my other testers. Success!
Final screens:
Updated Home Screen
Updated Opportunity Details Screen
Updated Nonprofit Details Screen
Choose Your Interests Screen
Updated Open-Ended Question Screen
One of the big lessons I learned on this project is when to pivot and how to pivot. When approaching a problem, in my case two failed project ideas which put me behind schedule, sometimes the answer is broadening scope. When my second idea fell through, I still had a user group. Rather than coming up with another random idea and gathering a new user group, I opted to engage with my users on a variety of different topics to see if a problem would present itself and it did! Using the design double diamond method to alternate between expanding and narrowing, the research I gathered allowed me to narrow in on a problem I could solve.
Another lesson I found valuable that I learned on previous projects, but continued to practice here was continually seeking feedback, both from my users and from my peers. I'm used to making decisions on my own, but because I'm still learning and because it's best practice, constantly bringing my work to others for their insights keeps me from getting stuck in my own ideas when my perspective is not the end-all-be-all of design. I'm designing for others; I need input from others. That doesn't necessarily mean I have to adopt every idea that's given, but to be a good designer it's important to always consider other people's perspectives.
