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Me and my team partner Guru took part in the Amazon College Design Jam organized by Adobe. This was a 2-week long event where we had to come up with a mobile app design prototype. We were also selected in the top-10 finalists out of about 300 teams, and had the opportunity to present our demo to senior designers at Amazon and Adobe.
Researcher, Designer, Presenter
The problem statement was revealed to us in the kickoff session. There was an emphasis on accessibility and inclusion for students no matter what their background or ability.
Through our research and interviews we uncovered several problems that students face when seeking community work. In a nutshell, we thought about how to onboard different kinds of students, giving the communities a better outreach through this platform, simplifying the volunteering application process, and incentivizing community work based on the number of hours.
We created a mobile app with accessibility focused onboarding, subtle pastel colors and simple typography keeping inclusion in mind. Moreover, the highlights of our solution included giving the communities a social presence to help find potential volunteers, using progressive disclosure to better understand the students' interests and prepare tailored opportunities for them, rewarding karma points for community work which can be redeemed for Volunteens merchandise, and allowing students to contact & apply to the opportunity on the same platform.
We divided our plan of action into mini 3-4 day sprints accomplishing various tasks. Initially, we researched common obstacles that high school students face by going through articles, blogs, and online forum discussions. Moreover, we had the opportunity to interview a few high school students & college freshers on this topic. Finally, we compiled all our research findings in Notion.
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Some key findings from our research included -:
- Students are required to complete a certain number of hours by their school
- Students often don't know where to start, and have difficult finding opportunities of interest to them
- Students waste a lot of time trying to find communities and contacting them manually
- A few students believe that volunteering is boring and not useful
- Some students specifically look for hybrid/remote opportunities and want to be informed about COVID-19 related guidelines for the workplace
After our 1st sprint involving research, we decided to think about high level features to address the major problems in an inclusive fashion. Since we were constrained to create a mobile app, we discarded non-digital solution ideas.
We curated numerous features individually, mapping them to a subproblem and then pitched our ideas to each other. Here are some of the features/considerations we came up with -:
- Students are required to complete a certain number of hours by their school
- Students often don't know where to start, and have difficult finding opportunities of interest to them; Students feel volunteering can be boring
- Students waste a lot of time trying to find communities and contacting them manually
- Some students specifically look for hybrid/remote opportunities and want to be informed about COVID-19 related guidelines for the workplace
- Accessibility considerations
Find detailed research finding-feature mapping here
During the brainstorming phase we felt that we tried to overdo it. Precisely, we thought about different kinds of users (the students, communities, schools, school board), etc. on the app and henceforth, found feature creep kicking in. We solved this by focusing on our primary users first and foremost, and deprioritizing schools and school boards as the users on the app by changing the user flow. This would also help us simplify the app, and keep the control of all opportunities with the app owners.
Instead of schools having a full-fledged control on the app with the opportunity to connect with their students, forming like-minded volunteering batches, approving requests and adding more opportunities on the app, we decided to just have the share functionality to help students link the opportunity to their schools.
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To summarize everything down, I created a quick sitemap of all the screens we wanted finally with the proposed features. This helped us proceed to sketching and get a better idea of the concept.
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A rough sitemap to help plan our final screens.
We spent limited time quickly putting together all the features into messy wireframes involving low effort. It was important to skip secondary screens and keep the fidelity low-medium, and put more focus on the concept and exploratory discussion rather than the details. After that we discussed each screen, pitching our thoughts to each other. Post that, we reached a consensus and drew the collated, final version of wireframes which would guide us when making the high fidelity mocks.
Our IA was based on - Volunteering opportunities for students seeking them, Communities for the students to find their niche, Resources for new volunteers and Profile page as a means of personalization, keeping track of one's volunteering engagement and the rewards system.
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Our combined, low-mid fidelity sketches.
We discussed our design with a mentor from Amazon for this hackathon and got valuable feedback. After our discussion, me and my teammate thought about potential improvements, for instance -:
- How can we keep students hooked to the app even after they have completed the required number of hours as mandated by their school?
- Can we add gamification, like levels based on volunteering experience?
- Can there be a timeline view of the application process for the students?
- Can we have a tab/page which shows a gallery of student experiences?
- Can we add a % match indicator based on interests to improve browsing experience?
- Can we watchlist/bookmark communities for quick access?
We included some of these in our final design like the % match indicator and bookmarking capabilities, however decided to keep the others in our future roadmap in interest of time.
Before starting our final design, it was important to be on the same page when creating the visuals. Henceforth, we spent time seeking inspiration through moodboards, illustrations and other digital apps before choosing our visual system.
I was primarily responsible for creating the initial concept of components for reuse, and my teammate picked the typography, colors, and illustrations. We then tweaked and polished the components on the fly to achieve consistency.
Our focus was on simplicity and readability, which made us choose the pastel colors, subtle typography, a fun yet not overwhelming content design, and use of inclusive and welcoming language + illustrations. Moreover, we created the components based on the principle of familiarity as we assumed that students have minimal experience with mobile apps to be on the safer side.
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I presented on behalf of my team to the judges and we received an overall positive feedback on the design.
Voice of the judges (senior designers at Amazon & Adobe) -:
- "The name Volunteens was right off the top... very clever, so I'm a fan! I loved the Karma points, it's a clever name and it carried through the app. " - Amy Baxter, Principal UX Designer at Amazon
- "Your team used color in a smart way. It's playful, but at the same time I can focus at the content. I also like that you thought about resources for new volunteers, this is very smart." - Jessica Kende, Designer at Adobe
- "Karma points were my favorite thing, I love that you have them in there. The approach of looking through the community lens really spoke to me, that was really awesome. Overall, easy to navigate and intuituive layout" - Veronica Mejia Stuart, Sr Manager (UX Research) at Amazon
We took note of the nitpicks and valuable feedback by the judges, as well as by others who tested our prototype which will help us further when designing for inclusion :)
A few things we had on the future roadmap for our design -:
- We didn't expand the UI for communities as one of the other primary users to avoid feature creep. However, there can be screens for the communities to manage their listed opportunities, review student applications, and send push notifications on the app
- Since some schools mandate approvals from their side for their students pursuing volunteer work, we can onboard schools to reduce friction in this process
- We would like to expand the concept on karma points, where that can be used to redeem goodies, merchandise, and run a leader board amongst friends or within schools.
- To improve app engagement, we thought about adding a news feed similar to social media platforms, but about volunteering experiences.
- App retention can be improved by adding push notifications to students from communities they worked with, new opportunities of interest and offers on karma points.
- We can allow communities to be featured if they get good ratings and meet a benchmark of certain number of volunteers. This would help them earn trust of the students.
- To improve recommendations for students, we can factor in students from their school & where they volunteered before.
My learnings were centered around optimizing how to function in a 2-person team and carefully timeboxing deliverables in a short amount of time.
