General Assembly UX short course 2017
In 2017 I completed a GA course for UX design. In my class project I wanted to focus on an area that I had personally found frustrating many times: finding a volunteering opportunity. Additionally, the charity sector is generally underrepresented and under-skilled on the digital front which made me want to explore the challenges of designing for it.
The aim of the course was to teach us the user centred design process and principles, following the double diamond approach.
Step 1
I started by interviewing some people who had previously volunteered, or attempted to find a volunteering opportunity, to identify goals, steps, and pain points in the process. From this I created two experience maps: one positive and one negative experience. The latter is shown above. From these semi-structured interviews I also created two personas to help me focus my requirements.
Step 2
Based on my requirements I developed a user journey, which then informed my first sketches. While paper prototypes are not universally considered the most useful for testing purposes, I find them really valuable for discussing design ideas with colleagues and to quickly iterate, validate, and discard ideas. In this case, I used them to test my user journey and to get feedback from my classmates on the general flow and overall structure.
Step 3
Following feedback from step 2, I mocked up some rough prototypes for testing. While my participants were enthusiastic about the idea, it was clear that I had overcomplicated the experience by trying to cram in too much information and functionality. It was time to downsize!
Step 4
The final version of my design was a slimmed down experience, with the focus on encouraging users to sign up for volunteering slots rather than providing endless choice.
Simple notifications, social login, and a location-based selection of organisations was received positively in another round of user testing.
Learnings
A detailed account of the design process in form of the final class presentation can be found in my Google Drive.
While I had previously done work on improving online experience and specific user journeys, this course was my first experience of the UX realm and I found it eye-opening. It was just after I had started working in the UX research team and really complimented what I was learning there with regards to usability evaluation. Amit Patel, our course leader, gave fantastic insight into the reality of user centred design practices and it was both fun and educational to develop our own project.