Overview

Adobe’s Creative Jam is an event where participants create and present solutions to a panel of industry experts. Amazon challenged us to design an inclusive experience for high school students looking to volunteer or complete community service hours, regardless of their background or ability. So, Niharika and I tried to answer the question, “How might we connect students with the community and make them feel involved?”

Research

Since we had a strict time limit of two weeks to complete the project, we conducted secondary research from different articles and publications. We discovered that students have the following experiences when volunteering –

1. Most high school students prefer to volunteer with their friends rather than alone.
2. High school students struggle to find volunteer opportunities that fit in their schedules.
3. High school students have a tough time finding volunteer opportunities that also align with their interests.
4. Students who found community service worthwhile also needed to self-reflect to understand the impact of their work - students who did this were more likely to volunteer in the future.

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The Problem

These findings revealed that the students find it hard to find a suitable volunteering place with their busy schedules. So we decided to focus on finding ways to connect students with the community.

Persona

We started by creating Harry Davis, the High school Student.

Ideation

We then came up with several features to help Harry, which we prioritized in terms of impact and feasibility.

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Design, Test, Iterate

We chose to make Engroup a mobile application so that students like Harry could access it anytime and anywhere. From there, we connected with a mentor from Adobe, Guo Chong. He helped us narrow the scope of Engroup and ideate on several features.

   1. Onboarding

• Designed Sign-up taskflow for new users.
• Recorded user interests to provide custom recommendations.

   2. Centre Recommendations with Filters

• Provided users with a list of volunteering centres, supported by a map and a search bar.
• Created a filter mechanism to help users find centres based on their needs.

   3. Volunteer Registration

• Implemented a feature to let students register as a volunteer at a given centre.
• Also integrated a parental consent form in the registration process.

   4. Invite Friends

• Added a feature to let users invite their friends to join a volunteering position.

Prototype

Niharika and I both worked on the wireframes above, with the visual theme I'd developed to maintain consistency. Using them, I created a high-fidelity prototype on Adobe XD.

Future Steps

Based on the feedback received, we considered the following steps to develop this project further.

   1. Conduct Usability Testing

• Recruit participants of the target demographic to test the prototype.
• Collect participant feedback and suggestions to improve the design.

   2. Explore More Big Ideas

• Given more time, we would explore features derived from our big ideas such as gamification to generate user interest in the application.
• Interview target users to understand their needs better, since our research was mainly based on articles and papers.

   3. Consider All Possible Paths

• Since we created a minimal viable product with only the happy path in mind, we would improve it in the future by considering alternate routes, user errors, etc.

Learnings

   1. Time Management is important.

      Since we had two weeks to work on this project, alongside all our school work, Niharika and I had to arrange meetings that fit both of our schedules. Unfortunately, we weren't able to get to primary research, low-fidelity wireframing and user testing. Going forward, we would try to manage time better so that we can follow the design process more effectively.

   2. Efficient Communication and Teamwork helps build both trust and good products.

       Niharika and I collaborated regularly through Zoom and WhatsApp. Keeping each other updated helped us stay in sync even when working asynchronously. Overall, the work that we did on this project was possible because of mutual trust and responsibility.

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