People all around the world experience lots of difficulties and necessities right now because of the pandemic. Even the in your neighborhood there could be a person that needs a little help. We need a tool for neighborhoods to make sure that everyone has food.
I designed GOOD, a mobile app that empowers our users by allowing them to donate directly to the person they want. It also enables users to donate cash or food items.
UX Design and Research Lead
Oct 2021
Figma, Photoshop
GOOD helps you donate to people in need in your neighborhood in an easy an anonimous way
To better understand how people would use the app and identify potential problems, I decided for conducting user interviews first before diving into solutions.
I interviewed around 4 people who would like to donate to different causes. I found that:
To better guide the design, I further synthesized the interview results and came up with the following personas:
With the research findings and personas in mind, I brainstorm solutions. I tried to come up with as many ideas as possible without considering feasibility at this stage.
I then went through the ideas and thought about their implementation feasibility. For example, creating a necessity profile for each user based on their needs seems to be an excellent solution; however, the machine learning algorithm behind it would be too complex for a developer to implement within the time constraints. Therefore, I had to make a compromise and provide recommendations based on users’ description when they registered as our first step.
Eventually, I settled on the following core functionalities:
I created the following wireframes and brought a Figma prototype to our potential users for feedback.
All users liked the registration flow and the function to directly donate to a person. This was reassuring for me, since these two functions are the primary focus of the app.
Some users were confused about donating directly in the app, since it is not a convention for them to do this kind of thing in an app.
Since the goal of our app is to help them feel comfortable while donating to other
people, I decided to make the profile picture optional. and focus my attention on helping them donate in a easy way.
I refined our design goals and matched the features I hoped to implement to the goals I hope to achieve:
For the first iteration, my primary goal is to validate whether the design helps different types of users donate faster and feel comfortable doing it. I also hoped to test the usability of the design, so that I can improve upon it.
With the goals I had for this iteration in mind, I moderated user feedback sessions with 5 users with different attitudestowards giving money to good causes. Here's a brief overview of the process:
To quantitatively measure the success of the design, I broke down the larger design goals into detailed, measurable ones, and developed a questionnaire to help me answer those questions.
I was able to gather a lot of positive feedback on the prototype, from users with different points of view towards charity. Here's a summary of how people rate their own donation speed, confidence, comfortableness, and frequency of future visits to the app:
In addition, 5 out of 5 users believe that the tool will gradually help them learn about the common ways to donate to charity. All of them are also willing to recommend the app to a friend, believe that it is a meaningful service to help people in their neighborhood.
Instead of showing a profile ilustration in each user card I opted for showing an alias they create when they register for the first time with their age and gender. I also modified the users card to make each one unique by giving them a unique background color.
For the on-boarding pages users expect to have a quick an easy to understand explanation on how the whole donation process works. So I changes some of the wording and redesigned the layout.
Here's the latest prototype with some of my updated changes.
This service rely heavily on users willingnes to use the app. How can I encourage users to open the app and donate to people they consider need help?, when they have no motivation to open the app? I listed an alternative for solving this problem together with their pros and cons. Future research/testing is needed to narrow down to the best posible options.
One way to encourage users to open and use the app is through gamifying the experience. As a future step, I'd like to explore whether badges for donations , and using a leaderboard of people who donate can encourage users to log and donate food.