CHALLENGE and solution
The mandatory high school volunteer process, already challenging due to its requirements, has become even more unfavorable for students due to limited in-person opportunities and mask protocols amid the pandemic. How can aspiring high school students find new volunteer opportunities that fit their interests during a pandemic?
View and filter recommended opportunities
Retrieve recommendations tailored to your profile, application, and location, and fine-tune your findings using the search filter.
Provides Immersive Educational Experience
Link organizations to volunteers while guiding users to appreciate the value of community services, cultivate leadership, and acquire new skills.
Review past meetups and Track your hours
Contact volunteer workers, reset volunteer hours, or invite friends to volunteer collectively. Earn achievement badges in the app after completing each volunteer task and educational program, visible on the profile.
PROCESS
01｜RESEARCHING OUR AUDIENCE
Identity development primarily occurs during adolescence. We target 12-18 year-olds because it's when they solidify their goals, values, and beliefs. To ensure active volunteering in adulthood, it's essential to educate and guide them at this stage.
02 | INTERVIEWING HIGH SCHOOLERS
To verify or refute our research, we interviewed 8 different high school and middle school students. We reached out to a mixture of people who had volunteered prior to and during the pandemic to see if there were any significant similarities or differences between the circumstances.
03 | USER INSIGHTS
We ultimately decided that our solution would meet the following two goals: help high school students find opportunities that best fit their interests quickly and easily, and motivate students to fulfill community service hours while learning the values of community service
04 | USER JOURNEY
Based on these insights, we created our persona Jade, a recent high school Freshman looking to volunteer during the pandemic.
we decided it would be best to focus on the experience of in-person volunteering and updated our journey map to reflect this.
05 | FINALIZING GOALS
We ultimately decided that our solution would meet the following two goals: help high school students find opportunities that best fit their interests quickly and easily, and motivate students to fulfill community service hours while learning the values of community service.
06 | BRAINSTORM
07 | Testing
we created a lo-fi prototype and conducted a series of think-aloud tests. We focused on a personalized homepage to let users discover and apply different opportunities.
Interactive Prototype︎︎︎
Final Thoughts
Community Service strengthens a sense of community and gives people hope for a post-pandemic future.
This project helped my teammates and I realize the inherent value of community service and the importance of the color blindness community among young people, an often overlooked part of high school culture. It was eye-opening to interview other high schoolers who wanted to explore a deeper sense of volunteer work- community service reminded them of a future when we can help each other and get through the pandemic together.
By conducting research, we found that lacking community service knowledge is one of the key reasons high schoolers don't actively volunteer outside of required hours. We foresee that the educational aspects could be more immersive in our app. For example, during the application process, we could help users learn topics related to their preferred categories by recommending them some workshops in the application detail page or notification page. Also, we could use pop-ups to provide a single piece of volunteer knowledge so users could passively learn more about volunteering.