New York Cares
Mobile App
Web-App
Responsive
Redesigning the orientation process for a more seamless experience
New York Cares
New York Cares is a non-profit organization focused on volunteer management. They offer a variety of different volunteering opportunities and help match these opportunities with potential volunteers. We reviewed and identified usability issues and to help create a seamless experience.
Role
UX Researcher,
UX/UI Designer
Team
Simon Tobias - UI Designer
Mergim Shalaj- UX Designer
Lily Chen- UX Researcher
Timeline
3 Weeks- Jan 2020
Motivation
Passion Project in the non-profit industry
PROBLEM
One of the problems we saw was the website was visually outdated, but we focused on evaluating the site for usability issues. We assumed that the home page was the problem as it doesn't onboard the user with the process.
RESEARCH
We have conducted a structure interview with five users that were frequent users to the site as well as potential users.
01 Can you walk me through the volunteering sign up process?
02 How was your experience with navigating the website?
03 Describe how the website content met your goals?
Understand
Humanizing Data
We created Alex based on the data gathered from the research process and the " I statements" that emerged from our affinity mapping
ALEX, 25
GOAL
She wants to find volunteer work that matches her schedule and interests
PAIN POINT
Sign up process is convoluted
and poorly designed
NEED
Wants an easy way to filter volunteer opportunities based on her preferences
Filters volunteer opportunities
based on time and skill needs
BEHAVIOR
Design
Challenge
How might we help users have a streamlined volunteer process based on her preferences?
Evaluating current website
We conducted a usability test on the existing website with four users with the rest of the users we gathered from the screener survey.
*The current process that New York Cares currently have to be able to participate in a volunteering opportunity is you must
01 Register & Create an account.
02 Attend an in-person orientation.
After entering all your preferences, search results page
60%
USERS
Were confused about the steps of the sign-up process especially orientation
Were confused about the steps of the sign-up process especially orientation
75%
USERS
Didn't find their preferred volunteer opportunity from the first search
Didn't find their preferred volunteer opportunity from the first search
Diverging and Converging Ideas
We conducted two rounds of design studio, we sketched our ideas and focused the team's effort into solving Alex's problem that represented the target audience.
Conversion of our Ideas- Last Phase of Design Studio
Ideate solutions for the defined problem
Iterate/Refine based on critique and feedback
Collaboratively decide on the best solution
Final Design Solution
Mid-Fi
Usability Report
We created an on-boarding process for the volunteer process on the home page
INSIGHTS
01 Users thought the on boarding circles were clickable, 45% clicked
directly on Volunteer
02 Users went straight to searching for opportunities
Validation
& Testing
Although our design creations failed in Mid-Fidelity, the insights we got were extremely valuable to the Hi-fi iterations, where we were able to translate our learning into design opportunities.
01
We removed the circles in the on boarding and add in step1,2,3 to display more of an on boarding
02
We color coded availability slots by circles when searching, so the users don't have to go through back & forth searching
Learnings &
Insight
View The Importance of Paper Prototyping full case study Here
01
What would I do differently next time?
I wish I time-boxed aggressively during our design studio, wasting time debating in the design studio, which has led us to skip paper prototyping which could have saved us a lot of errors.
02
Over communicating
What didn't make our design process efficient was that we didn't over-communicate or schedule a time for stand up to check in with each other which made gaps between our team.
03
Next Steps
After focusing on MVP, the next steps would be to conduct Heuristic Evaluation and see if the site meets accessibility guidelines + Conduct further usability testing on Hi-Fi