Volunteer App for Non-Profits
“Fred listened carefully to understand the goals of the solution and took the time to communicate the process necessary to deliver an accurate experience. The mobile prototype he created provided a very realistic feel for what it would be like to use the platform and it was critical to driving early stage interest and ultimately adoption. I highly recommend Fred as a collaborative UX designer sensitive to design and delivering on concept.”
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
The client was a startup who is developing a white labelled Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) offering for Non-Profit Organizations. The app will allow an organization to connect their volunteers with people in the community who need help. It will also allow volunteers to create a profile and indicate what types of services they are able to provide, and allow community organizers to create “let’s all pitch in” type events which volunteers can sign up for. Individuals in need of services can post a request that volunteers can respond to. The location-aware app will let volunteers see all help opportunities near them and let them quickly respond with an offer to help.
For Administrators at the Non-Profit organization, there is a rich analytics dashboard that measures engagement, number of volunteers, number of people helped, and year over year trends. The goal of the prototype was to communicate the value of the platform to potential investors and major Non-Profit Organizations - giving them a tangible feel for how easy it would be to use the app. This app is currently in the prototype stage.
WHAT I DID ON THIS PROJECT
I was the User Experience Designer and the Visual Designer. I worked closely with the founders to develop their platform vision into a simple and intuitive mobile app. Extensive paper prototyping was done to sketch out all of the user flows and I had significant input into how the app should work to create the best possible user experience. This app is currently in the prototype stage.
WHAT I LEARNED ON THIS PROJECT
As with all my projects, I used Invision to create the hi res clickable prototype that can be interacted with directly on the iOS device. Because this PAAS offering was being pitched to several Non-Profit organizations, my client wanted different versions of the prototype… one for each of 2 Non-Profits, and one showing what the interface would be like for the Non-Profit Administrators (showing the Dashboard etc). I chose to create a single prototype that would handle all 3 of those. What I learned is that I would have been much smarter to create 3 separate prototypes. Combining them meant I had to create many more screens in the prototype, and wiring them together with clickable hotspots was significantly more time consuming. I could have achieved the result with less effort had I done them separately.