Hero Hub
Bringing together volunteers and opportunities and giving real heroes their capes
The Team
Jennifer Jung, Haewon Park, & Faith Zimmerman
The Duration
Four months (one semester)
The Project
Our team was given one semester to design anything that we could think of, so long as it could be related to one of the UN's Sustainable Development goals. Because of our own frustrations with the process of finding and scheduling volunteer events, we knew there could be a better solution. We decided to create an app that allows users to post, find, and sign up for volunteer activities. By combining all of these opportunities in one place, users can easily find something fulfilling!
The Process
Our team started by outlining the problem and creating a plan for a solution. Plan in hand, we started conducting user research in the form of interviews to hear from current volunteers and volunteer coordinators. We wanted to explore their current systems and strategies and any pain points or advantages of their current solutions. After analyzing this data in our team, we created four main personas, two personas interesting in volunteering and two interested in recruiting volunteers.
From these personas, we developed scenarios and storyboards to further understand our target audience and see how they might interact with tool like ours. This helped us think through various use cases and ensure that our solution would meet a variety of needs. This led right into an initial user flow diagram which allowed us to visualize possible high level screens and interactions without getting distracted with visuals yet.
Once we understood our audience and the journeys we wanted them to take, we were ready to put together some low fidelity prototypes to get our ideas down and solicit some early feedback.
We iterated on these early designs many times based on multiple rounds of user testing and feedback. For example, users found the add and calendar icons on the home page to be confusing, and we went through three or four before we found an icon that worked.
We eventually chose colors that we felt brought energy to the project without being overwhelming and separated the volunteer section from that of the volunteer seekers. Our style guide provided structure and consistency to the project, especially as our team often worked asynchronously.
Finally, we arrived at a final prototype that we were proud of! Users were able to navigate the app with success and our main user flows were working exactly how we had planned! While we weren't able to design and implement every aspect of the plan due to time constraints, Hero Hub was still able to meet our original vision: combine volunteer opportunities from across the internet and help users sign up up for these events and even post their own.
Feel free to click through the prototype to the right to get a feel for it!
The Takeaways
This was the first project I worked on where I was able to meaningfully combine user research and design. I love understanding how users think and solving their problems their way, and this project gave me practice with that. We started by interviewing target users and continued to get their feedback during every stage of the process.
Furthermore, Hero Hub was the first time I designed in a group, and it proved to me just how magical teamwork can be. Our team created something that none of us could've done on our own, and we were able to each contribute our unique skills to build something we could all be proud of.
