Making Volunteering More Accessible
Georgia Institute of Technology, ID 3824 - Summer 2022
Georgia Institute of Technology, ID 3824 - Summer 2022
Sept-Dec 2021
Interaction Design
User Research
Branding
Figma
Google Forms
Designer
Volunteering has a special place in my heart, but unfortunately, it's difficult to do. After volunteering at different organizations, I witnessed theses issues firsthand, and I wanted to use this studio project as an opportunity to investigate this problem and propose a solution.
Food4Lives is the primary organization that I volunteered at as a basis for a lot of the information provided as it informed a lot of the decisions made in this project. If this project continued, the goal would be to impact the Atlanta volunteering community and influence the way people think about volunteering.
I conducted an initial survey with 41 people, including organizers and volunteers from the non-profit Food4Lives in Atlanta. These are the key issues I discovered:
Course load was the most prominent reason why volunteers couldn't attend.
More than half of respondents expressed reluctance to volunteer alone, deterring past participation
At Georgia Tech's Circle K Club, only 6 out of 27 volunteers owned cars, leading to a limited schedule
These factors lead to hundreds of pounds of food going to waste at Food4Lives per year. There was an instance where, if another volunteer hadn't driven us to the organization, there wouldn't have been enough manpower to unload an entire 17' U-Haul full of food which would've all been wasted as we were the only people there.
With these focus points in mind, we asked the question...
I followed a heuristic process for designing, starting with thorough research to define the problem. Then, I brainstormed, designed, and tested ideas until time constraints
Once I had a problem statement, I wanted to explore what was currently on the market and what problem areas lied in those services.
InnerView is a student-exclusive platform features a ranking system but lacks in-app communication.
VolunteerMatch offers an efficient framework for organizing volunteer opportunities but is flooded with non-philanthropic options like concert security roles.
Before jumping straight into designs, I crafted a user flow map to ensure I had a plan and designed intentionally
Initial designs for this project was guided by the user flow that I created, and I designed out wireframes in order to just get my ideas on Figma and present the ideas themself without being influenced by aesthetics. This also provided extra time to develop the look and feel for the application and the surrounding branding.
There was a lot of missing pieces that were brought up when I delivered this project for a critique. What did the sign in and registration process look like? How would organizers interact with this application? What kind of details would be shown for the organization and event?
In the next iterations, I addressed the questions asked and rethought the flow a bit. As a result, I created two additional stages. The first one is "Set Up," solely for volunteers and organizers to sign up for the application and get started. The next is the "Organizer," which is separate from the rest of the flow and contains organizer-specific functions.
As the class wrapped up, I finalized the designs I had by creating assets for this application and wrapping it nicely in branding that fits the purpose and tone of the service itself.
This application was designed with multiple breakpoints in mind to ensure that it is accessible from any device.
As the class concluded, there are definitely some next steps that could be taken to take this application to a product and then to the market. Fully expanding on the organizer’s view of this application would be essential, and conducting more user research to improve general features to see if this product is actually feasible in the long term.
This project became a valuable learning tool, teaching me to think outside of the scope of design concerns and think about issues such as privacy and How to create effective and compelling prototypes using interactionsDesign opportunities can be found anywhere with just a little digging
