VolunteerWiki: Organizing your skills and talents for good
How it all started
I believe passionate, caring people can change the world by bringing our unique perspectives and life experiences to bear on some of today’s most difficult problems. I also know that this kind of work does not always come with financial rewards. Much of the work in culture, arts, and social service organizations is done by volunteers — people who devote their free time and energy to causes they care about. Having volunteered with a diverse range of organizations myself, I have personally felt most rewarded by my experience when I have had a clear sense of the organization’s mission, concrete tasks to work on, and a sense that I am able to use my skills and talents effectively. However, I have also seen firsthand that volunteer labor can be inconsistent and unpredictable — it is, after all, subject to the constraints of volunteers’ daily lives — and is not always used to its full potential. When volunteers lack information, training, or troubleshooting resources, they may become discouraged, confused, or burned out, and as a result, the whole organization — and those who benefit from it — can suffer. What if there were a simple, efficient system for making sure volunteers within an organization had access to the information they need, when they need it?
Enter VolunteerWiki
I interviewed a number of people about their experiences, as well as drew on my own experiences, doing volunteer work. What are some of the challenges in making sure their organization gets the relevant information to the people who need it? How do they get people to engage with their organization? And so on.
Ideation
Based on my insights from interviewing, I designed a prototype. The point of view behind my design was, “When most of the work in an organization is done by volunteers, essential information and tasks need to be made readily accessible to ensure that group activities run consistently.” In other words, given that volunteers may have limited and inconsistent amounts of time and energy to devote to a project or organization, an institutional repository of knowledge and resources needs to be made easily available to all volunteers, to minimize relying on particular (likely already overburdened) individuals within the institution. As someone who both learns best through visual media and has a tendency to be disorganized, I rely on a number of visual, external systems to organize and motivate myself in my day-to-day life. I was able to draw a great deal of inspiration, then, from the organizational systems I have used, including, among others, labeled shelves and a color-coded daily calendar. I was also inspired by the organizational systems I have used at various organizations I’ve volunteered with — I took note of what had worked well, and where there had been breakdowns or pain points, in order to effectively organize my app. Thus the most important aspects of the design were a Wiki, so that individuals could contribute the knowledge they already had, and a chat system so that volunteers who had a question could easily reach someone who had marked themselves as available in real time, rather than waiting for a reply from someone who might be engaged in another activity.
Storyboards and Prototypes
My original prototypes had conceptualized the two ideas — an informational wiki and a contact system — separately. After showing my paper prototypes to some classmates, I decided to combine them. I made a number of other changes based on the heuristic evaluation. I learned, for instance, that what’s intuitive to me isn’t always so to others, and changed aspects of the organization of the app accordingly. In particular, I took into account a variety of use cases, and strove to make the app as flexible as possible for the different ways in which people might use it.
I created my first wireframe using simple Windows tools, including PowerPoint. Finding a good prototyping tool was a bit of a challenge. I discovered that each has its good and bad aspects. I first tried InVision, then discovered that Marvel — an app I’ve used before for prototyping — has some great features, including the ability to test the app right from your phone. I used my phone to test one of the earlier iterations of VolunteerWiki with several of my friends, and got more suggestions. However, neither Marvel nor InVision had the capacity to add some of the interactive features I wanted to simulate for the prototype, such as a Wiki. So, having asked for suggestions on the Coursera forums, I decided to try Proto.io for my final prototype.
User Testing
I tested two versions of my app using the UserTesting website. The alternate versions were based on the fact that few of my in-person testers used the chat feature. I hypothesized that this was because they did not know what it was for. Consequently, I did an A/B test with the original app and a redesigned version that included links to, and explanations of, the chat feature. While the use of the chat feature did not significantly differ between the two versions, interestingly, the redesigned version got much higher ratings and more positive comments from the testers. This could certainly be explained by chance (each version had only two testers), but it is also possible that the presence of explanatory text and help links — even if they were not used — made the app seem more user-friendly.
Final Prototype
See a final prototype of the app here: https://pr.to/IYS6Q7/
