Moving to a new city means new opportunity, but also, rebuilding your community.
Activate connects new residents with local volunteer opportunities
Activate explored how relocated graduates could connect with local nonprofits for increased community interaction.
When considering employee turnover rate, companies can better maintain their top talent if the individual is happy where they are and connected to their community. If done well, this could be a triple win for employers, local causes and employees.
This could be a positive opportunity for social connection as well as community improvement.
I worked as a full-service product designer on a three-person team over six months, with limited budget.
Our final design included a mobile-first experience and a desktop service.
We had full control over the end to end process, the look and feel, everything. So I got a full third portion of the work, it was really exciting.
With guidance from Smashing Ideas, a local product design agency, we worked through the following key decisions:
when and where they would use the product, how other participants would fit into the service, and what would distinguish Activate from existing offerings.
Our key mentor met with us periodically and organized a professional critique with the larger Smashing Ideas team to test the viability of the concept. She also pointed us toward local organizations of interest where we could conduct a contextual inquiry.
We conducted extensive research to get a full understanding of the problem space and our users.
This included primary and secondary research, emotion mapping, and storyboard-based focus groups.
Interviews with prospective volunteers, nonprofits, and other stakeholders informed the design.
As a team of three, I led, observed and annotated these interviews in turn.
A few difficult points included scope, as well as social good bias and people struggling to report accurately.
“Volunteering” covers so many activities that participants sometimes struggled to understand what the service included.
We found that there was guilt and emotion that disrupted self-reporting of these activities, too.
We produced a mobile and desktop service in figma based on the results and tested with potential users.
This resulted in product feedback and the updating of varied elements to better suit how actual volunteers and organizers live their lives.
If I revisited Activate, I would start with one type of volunteer work or one nonprofit partner.
I would position this with a stronger view on how it may benefit an employer to give people an easier understanding of why its helpful and worth investing in.
I find that “altruistic” apps carry the connotation of a money suck, guilt trip, or waste of time to many prospective stakeholders. If I were to do this again, positioning would be targetted squarely at the interests of an identified investor rather than any form of emotional or moral argument.