Role
- Product Designer
Team
- 2 Product Designers
- 1 UX Researcher
Duration
- Feb 2020 (3 weeks)
Project Type
- New Feature Design
My Role
- Lead Product Designer
- Responsible for UI/UX Design and IxD.
- Play a key role in user research, ideation, roadmapping, analysis, and feature design.
Background
“Today, more than ever, people are looking to get involved, providing their brains and their brawn to make a difference in the world.”
Virtualwork.com is one of the largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace. They connected millions of employers and freelancers globally from hundreds of countries, regions, and territories. They want to leverage the platform and infrastructure that connect people with organizations in volunteering and community areas.
To accompany the freelancing work on Virtualworks, we designed a new way to highlight and feature the volunteering on the site. In the volunteering experience, we were focusing on improving the volunteering discovery experiences to make it more specific related to users’ skillsets, and the engagement experiences to allow users to stay involved in the communities with their participation.
Business Objectives
What were we trying to achieve?
- Introduce new volunteering features
- Connect people with organization
Constraints
What restriction we are facing?
- Leverage the existing infrastructure
- Short turnaround time
- Integrated with the existing offering
Responsibilities
What was I responsible for?
- Lead the user research about volunteering patterns and experience
- Deliver the design for new feature
Design Problem
Users of virtualworks.com want to have an easy way to browse volunteer opportunities and connect with like-minded people. Many do look for opportunities on search engines but can’t find that many related tasks.
Problem Statement
Identifying problems with existing experience
To get a better understanding of the volunteer market, target group, and user goals, we started by interviewing the active volunteers, and organizers of non-profit projects. We noticed that the current volunteers have a hard time discovering projects that they feel related to and willing to get involved with. The contextual research helped us identify the following problems with volunteering:
- Difficult to find skill related projects:
Users have a hard time find the right projects related to their skill sets or skills they want to learn - Unawareness:
Users are not aware of their ability or skills to help - Hard to see impact:
After accomplish the assignment, many volunteer had a hard time to see the impact of their efforts on the project in long run - Community:
Users want to get involved in the community and be validated on efforts
I definitely am picky about opportunities that fit my exact skills or else I will not do them.
Understand Users
Convenience drives users to virtual volunteering
Virtual volunteering gets popular due to convenience and no timeframe limits. The Internet has become an important tool not only for recruiting volunteers, as well as performing volunteer work. We used quantitative questionnaires to the general population to study their motivation and behaviors. By analyzing over 350 responses, we identified the leading reasons and barriers of volunteering.
Virtual volunteers care more about exploring their own strengths and practicing their skills. They view volunteering as opportunities to grow and connect with certain communities.
Finding the time to volunteer was the leading barrier to volunteering. Lacking sufficient information and inconvenience are also an obstacle to providing help for non-profit organization or group.
Though younger generation more naturally use internet searching for opportunities. Older volunteers were just as likely to use the internet for performing volunteer tasks.
Target Group
Identifying our target audience
Two different customer profiles are created to help us understand the motivation and behaviors using volunteering platform. The aim of target group analysis is to ensure the design of the volunteering feature will serve the needs of the future users.
Self-starter
Self-starter thinks volunteering is an opportunity to practice their skills and learn new techniques in professional practice. They pay attention to all the details of the projects and focus on the opportunities related to their career.
Motivation:
- Practice skills
- Learn new skills
- Share skills
- Enhance career
- Find inspiration from others project
Behaviors:
- Search opportunities that match their skill sets
- Find opportunities as fast as possible
- Browsing projects on the go
- They care about context of project
- They don’t work for different organizations
Demands on the product:
- Find opportunity to match their skills
- Make a difference with their skill set
- Book preview and reviews
Potential Pain Points:
- Project is not clear for what skills are required
- They can’t find the right projects (don’t know how to find it)
- Very picky about projects that they chose
Network Personnel
Network personnel wants to build connections within the communities by contributing efforts. They care about the results and achievements of their efforts. They want to meet new people and get involved in the communities. They pay attention to the cause of the projects and organizations.
Motivation:
- See results or achievements
- To meet new people
- Understand more about their community
- Wants to have a good public image
Behaviors:
- They will talk to people in the same volunteer events
- Connect to the organizer
- Known more about the details of the organization
- Share updates on social media
- Staying updated with community
- They are leaders
Demands on the product:
- Stay connected to fellow volunteer members
- Get involved in community and influence community
Potential Pain Points:
- Not able to see the impacts in the community
- Not know the mission and purpose of the projects
- Lack of validation for efforts
Competitive Analysis
Identifying potential areas of opportunity by study competitors strategy and features
We compare competitor volunteering and freelancing features in order to identify potential areas of opportunity to improve the virtual volunteering experience. We analyzed the personalized features, competitive advantage, and business goals of our competitors. This helped us utilize the advantage of the virtualworks.com platform and provide a superior volunteering experience.
Design Strategy
We predict that by have a skill-driven volunteering platform for volunteering, virtualworks.com can leverage the freelancing infrastructure to expand the market and increase users. By having social features for users and organizations to connect with each other, we will see users intuitively stay involved in the community and build on-going relationships with organizations.
Design Exploration
Collaborating with users and finding creative ways to explore different ideas
After studying target group and business goal, we held design studios to explore initial designs and determine high-level product direction. As a team, we invite users and stakeholders to join the design studios for ideation. Here are some of our key visions for volunteering features
- Core competency:
Volunteering opportunities and volunteer profile based on skill learning and practicing. - Information:
Provide critical information about projects upfront. Utilize advanced filter feature to narrow down result. - Variety:
Large selection of volunteering opportunities to choose from. - Community Engagement:
Adding active feeds so users can always stay updated on their volunteer projects. - Promotions:
Sections on the landing page to promote the new volunteering feature.
User Journey Map
Thinking about incomplete situations and redefining patterns
Based on the storytelling the user experience, we built user journey maps for both target groups based on current user behaviors, existing features and user emotion. The journey map helped us scoped the portion of the user experience we can focus on.
Based on the user journey map, we prioritized our strategy from a design perspective and narrowed down to possible solutions as following
- Skill-related information:
Building the system around the skills, including medals, tags and search filters - Social platform:
Active feed and posts for both volunteer personnel and organizations - Visual layout:
Using efficient communication and hierarchy of the information that users can easily find what they want to see
Using all the relevant information in decision making, we portrayed the new task flow that streamlined the volunteering experience.
Prototyping and Testing
Using prototyping to simulate the design in the scenario and testing their interaction
We implemented our ideas in the form of click-through prototypes and iterate according to the user testing result. We tested the click paths and linear sequences with potential users.
Paper Prototyping
User Testing
Iterating
Final Design
New volunteering feature tab with redesigned landing page
While we added the browse volunteer feature tab on the navigation, we designed the corresponding landing page components that related to the volunteering feature as well. The components help the first time users easier to recognize and relate to the virtual volunteering.
Final Design
Optimized the volunteering by relevant information and filter
We built the skill medals, which are earned through participating in projects that need your personal skill set to get the job done. The medals help users learn what their own skill sets are and won’t have to think twice or doubt about the help they could offer in a project. Meanwhile, the organizations will be easier to find and reach out to volunteers that meet their requisites.
Skill types are used as tags to help narrow down users’ search to find volunteer opportunities they best fit in. Along with skill tags, you are also able to filter search to desired duration and frequency to find projects users can attend on their own time. This helps people who can’t find the time to volunteer due to schedules not being flexible and the location of the event being too far.
Final Design
Connect and reach out
We designed the projects page with the ongoing progress and updates. This helps reassures volunteers that their work is making a difference in the community or around the world and also gives the volunteers the feeling of accomplishment.
Adding connections or friends online and instant messaging has always been an efficient feature throughout all online platforms (Facebook, LinkIn, etc.). Adding these features to our website will allow users to continue to come together and make a difference in their communities or worldwide.
Responsive Design
Designed for on-the-go scenario
We designed the pages with responsive design in the mind. The whole website will adapt to the mobile device, which allows users to use the system on-the-go.
Prototype
You can interact with the live prototype here:
Next Step
Reflecting on our process, the project outcome and next step
While working on this project, I led the team through user research and made design decisions based on the quantitative analysis and qualitative context inquiry. Using the lean UX strategy, we were able to iterate fast based on user testing in the short turnaround time.
We took a risk not A/B testing some of the changes we made due to time limits on the project, but in the end, we were happy to see our design has high acceptance in user testing and our hard work paid off. In the future, we planning to do full usability tests and analyze the user acceptance testing. Regardless, I believed we built the necessary structure of the new feature and a good starting point for future iteration.