Overview: Petal Portal is a responsive website that both streamlines the way people can submit projects and register for upcoming volunteer events
Role: UX Researcher | UX Designer
The Challenge
People want to contribute to their local community, however, there is not a simple, centralized way for people to get connect to opportunities.
How might we facilitate more project proposals and formally connect volunteers to projects?
Research
Through affinity mapping, which involves pulling quotes and thought processes directly from the interviewees and placing them on individual post-it notes. We then grouped similar data points and determined common themes across the interviews.
Based on our research, we developed two personas that best represent our target audience. We researched our users and synthesized the data to pinpoint trends of pain points from our target users such as a need for discovery, information, motivation and scheduling. From identifying these needs we created the two personas, introducing Ronnie and Ollie.
Findings
Volunteers DISCOVER opportunities informally, through social media or word of mouth
They would like INFORMATION about the event, such as specific tasks or how to prepare
LOCATION matters to the users, as they are more likely to get involved locally both to see the impact of their work and for convenience
Users want to know about OTHER VOLUNTEERS going to an event
Insights to Features
Design
The features we decided to build focused on allowing the user to add a project for review and volunteer for a project in the fewest steps needed.
We knew that our design had to be accessible on mobile, but that it didn’t make sense to design a native mobile app. We chose to design a responsive web app that worked as an external site to Project Petals main website.
I conducted a Design Studio with our team. This collaborative process is a way of rapidly generating potential solutions for our problem. By individually sketching, pitching, critiquing and iterating we were able to visualize our ideas and refine our design.
We also did another Design Studio with the founder of Project Petals, Alicia. Together we discussed the current process volunteers need to go through in order to join a project and what features would matter the most to Project Petals.
Prototype
