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Evolving a tool that connects people with opportunities, tracks volunteer hours, and demonstrates the impact of community engagement.
As product designer for NobleHour, I collaborated with the product team to improve existing features as well as design and plan new features for upcoming release. To create a strong foundation for the product moving forward, I established a consistent, ADA-compliant design system and began building a component library to be used for implementing planned features with efficiency. I also helped to refocus the product team on the end user, conducting user and stakeholder research.
Research driven by user-centered design
My first priority as product designer was to develop a deeper understanding of what our non-profit and volunteer users need and want, and how the product was designed and built, in order to spotlight opportunities for continually evolution and improvement. The product team had been gathering user insights and feedback through Full Story and in Product Board, but much of that insight had not been incorporated into the design process. My initial efforts of research and observation included:
An online user survey within the product to collect baseline user feedback about the product prior to the 3.0 product release
In-depth phone interviews with 10 admin users of the product who had long-term experience with the it and use some of the more complex features on a regular basis
Review of all available insights, analytics and accessibility testing results
Research into volunteer management best practices and academic research about volunteer engagement
Establishing a product-wide design system
To ensure consistency and increase efficiency, I began the process of creating a design system for the NobleHour product. Based on Material Design, the system defined key elements of the UI that could be implemented product-wide in collaboration with the head front-end developer.
Introducing Causes
A new feature in the works was the introduction of “Causes” to the product, which would allow organizations, companies and volunteers to connect around the causes they care about most. I conducted research and provided recommendations for the structure of the new taxonomy, how to integrate Causes into the existing product structure, and how to introduce and promote the feature in order to increase engagement and create more meaningful connections between the volunteers and the organizations they spent time with.
Improving the volunteer opportunity creation process
Another major effort we were undertaking was an overhaul of the entire concept of “Opportunities” within the product. Our first focus was to improve the experience of creating and maintaining a volunteer opportunity. Feedback from the interviews I’d conducted helped to define our user’s needs, which informed a set of recommendations that outlined key areas of improvement.
Reducing friction and simplifying the creation and editing process would save our non-profit users precious time, a priority for them. As part of our cross-functional team, I helped to generate ideas for how we could modernize the form and reorganize the information to create an intuitive and inviting flow. We gathered requirements and user stories in Jira to document our work. I created an Axure prototype for us to discuss and iterate, then developed a high fidelity prototype in Figma. Unfortunately the effort was cut short at this point by the shutdown of Treetop Commons.