A Volunteering Case Study
Connecting people with opportunity
Raise a hand was a 2 week sprint concept project working for Freelancer.com. My team and I developed an IOS app to bridge the gap between people wanting to volunteer and actually volunteering. The goal was to make the volunteering space more accessible and more customizable to fit the users needs. Freelancer.com employed us use its existing platform to connect volunteers with non-profits.
My Process
What are our competitors doing?
Heuristics
I ran a Lemurs heuristics test on another website called catchafire.org. Somethings I learned were that navigation on their site was very well put together. Everything was intuitive. I could anticipate where I was going to be in the site before I was there.
Understanding people and their motives
User Survey
In order to better understand people and their motives we build a user survey. I wanted to make sure we were gathering data from mostly people who didn't volunteer or haven't very much in the past year. I started by asking when the last time they volunteered was. I went on to ask if they wanted to volunteer more. Here is a stat from the survey.
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How many times have you volunteered in the past 6 months? (i.e. giving back to you community, volunteering your time towards a non-profit or charity etc.)
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64 responses
0-2 Times
2-4 Times
4-6 Times
Would you like to volunteer more than you currently do?
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64 responses
Yes
No
User Interviews
Trying to get to the bottom of it
I hypothesized that if we could gather the motives of our users they would keep coming back to the product. My first question was asking about the users life and how they spent their free time. I wanted to come at the user with a wide net and also just start the interview off conversationally. I then transitioned into a little deeper of a question but still casting a wide net. I asked, What motivates you through life. This questions got to the root of what makes these people tick. Why they do or do not do something. I was then able to identify their needs. I soon transitioned into asking general questions about volunteering to gather where they were in that world.
Synthesizing Data
Affinity Mapping
In trying to gathering insights within our user research we began to affinity map. Some of those key insights were as follows
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I want to give back
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I want to do what interests me
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I'm influenced by my friends and family
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I have awareness of my privilege
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I want to give back
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I do not know how to give back
Defining the problem
The problem for our user is that they have a want to volunteer they just don't know where or how to do so.
Persona Development
With all this research we developed two different personas. The personas helped me identify a group of people and their motivations, goals, and pain points. The two personas are based on the users I interviewed.
Designing the Product
Deciding on going mobile
We decided on going mobile for this project because it realistically met our users needs. This was decided through the prior research we had done. It was more accessible than a desktop website and allowed the user to use it while they were on the go. We understood that some of our users were busy and wanted to access this while traveling or doing other things.
MVP (minimum viable product)
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Search function
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Easy signup or no sign up required for entry
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GPS location
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Gamification
We then walked through some things the mobile app must have.
The Final Product
First I started sketching out what our product could look like. This began with a lot of brain storming and what we thought it could look like. We white boarded and we did a lot of sketching at home on our own. We came together the next day to put everything together. I did a crucial part in the wire framing which was developing the gamification ideas and showing the customers impact. Below are our final wire frames.
In Conclusion
In conclusion we built an app that accomplished the users goals. It brings people together under one cause. It also makes finding opportunities easy. It also lets you find causes that you care.our next steps would be more user testing and we would build out the gamification even more. We would also build out the venders part of the app.