Scope

General Assembly
1 week

Team

Alissa Rubin
Harshita Nedunuri
Jason FleitZ

Key Skills

DESIGN Research
Wireframing
Usability Testing

This statement is familiar to a lot of us. We want to give back to our communities; we have good intentions…so what’s stopping us from following through?

What is Seed?

Seed is a mobile app design created in 2016 to connect volunteers with local causes they are passionate about. It was conceived of and designed in a six-day General Assembly UX sprint with three collaborators: Harshita Nedunuri (product designer), Jason Fleitz (visual designer), and myself (product designer and UX writer). The final product is a mid-fidelity prototype linking the key screens of the app.

We chose a volunteerism app because of our own interest in community participation, and the challenges that had prevented us from regularly engaging in community service.

How might we connect would-be volunteers with causes they care about? In its ideal form, we imagined Seed as a website and app that facilitates volunteering and event organization for both volunteers and orgs hosting events. It's a social media and recruiting platform, as well as an organizational and analytics tool for event hosts. For volunteers, it's a space to find events that meet their personal goals and that encourage their active participation through clarity, detail, and the motivation and accountability that comes from participating in a social network.

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Once we settled on our idea for a digital volunteering product, we conducted both user research and market research to determine what our product should actually do, and how it could improve upon existing websites or apps. Due to the short timeline for the project, we focused primarily on the consumer-facing side of the product, thinking only broadly about the event-organizing side in order to understand how our product should function as a cohesive system.

We wanted to know, what do would-be volunteers hope to get out of the experience?

People get discouraged by small challenges or inconveniences, because they are stepping outside of their comfort zone.

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In total we conducted eight interviews with volunteers following an interview guide we developed together, and learned about actual and ideal volunteer habits, existing resources people use to find opportunities, positive and negative experiences, and barriers to volunteering. We also interviewed two event/volunteer organizers about the challenges of their job and their needs as an organizer.

We recruited from fellow workshop attendees and from personal connections. I conducted solo interviews, three with volunteers and one with an event organizer, facilitating the discussion as well as note-taking. We then came together as a team to share our findings, and were able to cluster volunteer habits and goals into three central personas.

Some of our major observations from volunteers were:

Key Insights

• It is a challenge to find opportunities in their area, that fit both interests and availability
  

• There is unclear or not enough information provided to feel confident committing
  

• They are nervous because there are no reviews, or ways to know what the experience will be like—they want it to be fun

• Signing up for an event requires too much work, like getting fingerprinted or approved in some way

  
  OR
  

• There is an open invitation to show up, which is easy to put off or forget about

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People attempting to start new volunteer activities are stepping outside their comfort zone, so they need more confidence and certainty to commit. We hypothesized that people need tailored motivators and then accountability to follow through with volunteer aspirations.

Drawing from our research learnings, we held a group brainstorming session and then narrowed down on the highest impact features:

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Through competitive analysis, we were able to see where volunteer needs are and are not being met currently. By studying how volunteers actually come to find their opportunities, we were able to map how our users might find us, what their expectations are, and what would draw them to our product. This step helped us to decide on developing an app rather than website, so that volunteers could save personalized settings and easily search for new opportunities when they had an opening in their schedule. It would standardize sign-up practices across all volunteer opportunities, removing the confusion of complex applications or unclear instructions from organizations with limited resources. It would also allow us to send notifications and facilitate communication between volunteers and event hosts, and follow social-media design patterns (like Yelp and Facebook Events) that volunteers are comfortable with and trust. Volunteers also want to have access to their event information when offline.

Each of these features stemmed directly from high-value needs we uncovered in interviews, reducing the most common barriers to volunteering.

It was crucial to enable a single sign-up process across all volunteer opportunities, much like the Common App.

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As we shifted from white-boarding and heaps of sticky notes to sketching and wire-framing with Sketch, we were usability-testing screens and flows, and iterating on these, many times a day with the help of immediate feedback from other workshop participants. This kept us laser-focused on usability and our users’ needs, and making quick progress in the few days we had to build. Every change we made to layout, visuals, copy, and task flows came directly from feedback that informed our problem areas as well as successes. As we continued to add new pages and features, we were able to test every step and make sure no interactions or features were unclear, unwanted, or disrupt the design patterns that were beginning to emerge.

When we had competing designs, we simple put them before the users. This eliminated every instance of creative tension.

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In the end, the final feedback we received from test users and workshop leaders was "I want this app!" This was very encouraging, considering the limited number of screens and limited visual design we were able to produce in six days. Given more time, we would conduct further user research to refine the needs of our app, and continue designing pages and refining layout with constant usability testing until a more complete prototype emerged. 

View the prototype in action below:

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This was a super fun project! I was truly exciting to see my understanding of the problem area and ideas about the solution shift during research. It was rewarding to put our designs to the test and get such frequent feedback that allowed us to improve and move forward quickly. My team was a breeze to work with, as we naturally fell into a divide-and-conquer strategy using our various strengths and interests. Disagreements we had about design direction were always solved quickly in usability testing, as it became clear which layouts and flows were most functional for users.

I would have loved to keep working on this app, and to have been able to bring it to life. I learned what a pleasure it is to have potential users to test with nearby any time you need them! I also started to learn, during this project, how much I love being a part of the design process from beginning to end. It’s a privilege to have ownership over the project and to have a first-hand understanding of the research and each design decision along the way.