FUTUER CONNECT
a mobile app for all high-school students to search and apply for volunteer opportunities to fulfill their community service hours. With the colors and hierarchy, our app is especially friendly to the audience with colorblindness. We also provides educational workshops to increase students' awareness on social issues and the diverse community to foster long-term participation.
This is an Adobe Creative Jam + Amazon competition project that Duo Xu and I developed and ranked top 10% out of 430 competitors (215 teams).
This piece is shortlisted in Young Ones ADC Competition in 2023 (UX/UI Catagory).
What Are The Challenges?
How can aspiring high school students find volunteer opportunities that fit their interests during a pandemic? 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 during the pandemic.
How Do We Approach 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.
What Do We Learn From Interviews?
To verify 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.
Over 70% of participants tend to choose to work at the organization closest to their school or home due to the surprise they feel at the complicated requirements for school volunteering and the stress of finding suitable opportunities. However, organizations often fail to update their website information in real-time.
We crafted our persona, Jade, a recent high school freshman eager to volunteer during the pandemic, and created a user journey map through her perspective to better understand the pain points experienced by high school students seeking volunteer opportunities.
How Can We Address The Painpoints and Reframe the User Experience?
We ultimately decided that our solution should meet two key goals: quickly and easily helping high school students find volunteer opportunities that best match their interests, and motivating students to fulfill their community service hours while learning the values of community service. Base on the goals and interview insights, we revision the user expeirence.
What are the Key Features?
- Retrieve recommendations tailored to your profile, application, and location, and fine-tune your findings using the search filter.
- Link organizations to volunteers while guiding users to appreciate the value of community services, cultivate leadership, and acquire new skills.
- 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.
How Do We Frame It Visually?
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.