Photo by Matthew Waring on Unsplash
Let's HelpOut
Let's help out is an app that aims to encourage more youths to contribute back to the community :)
How it all started.
Circumstances: 1 week UXUI research project into an area of interest.
Initial starting point: When I was in university, I did my FYP on charities, focusing on the consequences of not caring about your fellow men ( see project in detail @ One day). Nine years after that project, it occurred to me again to wonder whether anything had change since then, do people care more? or in this case I was banking on past knowledge that people still didn't care very much about our society, with more and more people being more concerned with outcomes above everything else.
UXID
Research Methodology: Secondary Research + User interviews
Secondary Research: With 2,215 registered charities in Singapore, up from 1,807 a decade ago in 2005, according to the Office of the Commissioner of Charities (COC) which oversees charities. Singapore has faced a 23% surge in the number of charities that is in the country over the years. In order to encourage more Singaporeans to donate to charity, the inland tax revenue gives out tax breaks to people who contribute to organized charities.
While people are donating more, more people are also volunteering more. However there is also a growing pool of past volunteers, as people do not like their volunteering experience and have less impetus to continue volunteering. Over half (53%) of former volunteers said that their volunteering experiences had not met expectations, with the most commonly cited reason being a lack of flexibility (28%) and a perception that the activity created little meaningful impact (25%).
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/29b-donated-to-charities-in-singapore-in-2016
User Interviews: The user interview questions were crafted to suss out how were people's perception towards contributing to charities, what were some areas of concern and how would they address these areas of concern. On the right were some of questions I used and the rationale behind these questions.
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Where is my user coming from?
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What are they trying to do?
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What questions will they have?
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What info do they need to take action?
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What choices do they have to make?
Questioning
Questions
What is your view point in regards to contributing to charity?
If you contribute to a charity, what would you prefer to contribute?
When was the last time you made a contribution to charity and why?
Do you find a lot of people in your age group contributing to charities?
Rationale
A relative question to probe for understanding about how people see charities, or acts of charity.
Because there are multiple options to contribute to a charity, I wanted to see what did people usually aspire to contribute when given a choice.
So beyond what people aspire to do, this question was created to check on what they actually did and what they thought was stopping them from reaching their ideals.
This was just to see who they observe was around them when they took part in such activities, so that I can glean more insight from the experience of my users through recollections of their own experiences
Affinity Mapping: Seeing Trends in user behaviour
Initial sketches of the wire framing for the application.
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The value of Affinity mapping: By far one of my favorite tools to use, only because it helps me see what are some of the trending behaviour that spans across my users. While not 100% accurate, it does help create rather useful insight into what my users could possibly looking at.
Below is a link to a pretty decent article on affinity mapping by Uxdict.io
https://uxdict.io/design-thinking-methods-affinity-diagrams-357bd8671ad4
Affinity
Mapping
Some of the learning points that came from this affinity mapping:
Learning point 1: Being sociable or being in a social setting was a driving point that made users contribute to charities. They were either asked by love ones or friends before being willing to spend time on charity.
Learning point 2: The limitation of time was a key reason as to why people couldn't or didn't want to contribute to charities. It was also the reason why people didn't like making long term commitments to charities because they were never certain whether they could keep to that commitment or whether they even wanted to have such a heavy commitment in the first place with so many other factors/ considerations in their lives.
Learning point 3: Most of the users would rather contribute their time over money, valuing the idea of providing a service vs just giving cash.
Defining the problem statement:
20 – 30s are interested in helping out at charitable organizations but have many social commitments and hence do not have much time to contribute to charities.
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[User type] needs [user’s need], because/so that they can/in order to [insight].
Example:
Employees need a way to keep track of their health insurance benefits, because they’re worried they’re not getting the most out of their coverage.
Busy travel planners need a quick way to find the best hotel room for their trip, because they don’t have enough time to investigate all the price options and reviews.
Problem Statements
Hypothesis:
We believe that by consolidating all the information on charitable opportunities, highlighting activities and learning opportunities. We will help young working adults create deeper bonds with their love ones and the community.
Initial sketches of the wire framing for the application.
The initial wireframe + Paper prototype so that I could test on users to see their reaction to the application screens and figure out whether the user flow made sense.
Let's Help Out App design
Branding
The branding behind let's help out was inspired by a life buoy, where it is something that will be tossed to people in order to save them when they are almost lost to the sea. Similarly, I see those people who offer to help out these charitable communities as the life buoys that are essential for these community groups to flourish.
Logo variations
Other aspects of the design
The app prompts the user to choose between weekend or weekday activities. This helps the system filter the activities for the user.
While it is necessary for people to login, the idea was to make the login process as seamless as possible with existing accounts that most users would have.
The application encourages users to setup their profile to find out when users prefer to engage in these activities and the type of activities they wish to participate in.
Once people have come to the activity's page, the app allows for people to sign up for their friends as well, along with giving users the options to use the app to send notifications through online communication channels to get them to join the activity as well. The accounts for users is mainly to secure point of contact for organisations, as well as to let users back out of activities in case of any last minute disruptions to plans.
