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Social Career, 2016-2018

Turning Vision into Reality: My UX Design Process for an Award-Winning NGO-Volunteer Platform

My Tasks: Product Design, User Research, UXUI design,  Usability Testing

Case study: Social Career, concept by Matthew Tam, Antony Wong and Antony Man

Overview

What is Social Career?

Social Career is a non-profit technology company which aims to create an increasingly volunteering-friendly environment to encourage the public contribution to the society.

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My Role

  • Role

    UX Architect
     

  • Duties

    From the outset of the product design to February 2018, I led the UX/UI design of the volunteering management platform for NGOs and volunteer side with both web & native app versions.

Collaboration teams

  • Closely collaborated with Business team, PM and IT team

Features

Client-side

  • ​Volunteering job posting

  • Member check-in management system

  • Volunteers' social impact analysis dashboard

  • QR code checkin.

User-side

  • ​Volunteering job searching

  • Calendar

  • Personal profile with Social CV

  • QR code checkin.

Challenge

There are several competitors in the current market, and one of them is using the ticketing rewards to attract volunteers; and the other one is providing a train services to NGOs, which included volunteer-recruitment and training. 

Challenge 1

  • We should make our product stand out in a crowed of these competitors, and encourage the public, especially skill-based volunteers, to contribute their time and talents back to society.

Challenge 3

  • We don't know what the typical challenges are when NGOs recruit volunteers.

Challenge 2

  • Initially, we had limited insight into the factors that volunteers consider when seeking out volunteer opportunities.

Our goal for the project

  • Develop a scalable, innovative platform that facilitates engagement between NGOs and volunteers.

  • Allow NGOs to easily track volunteer hours and manage their recruitment processes.

  • Provide volunteers with a fast and user-friendly experience for searching and applying for volunteer opportunities.

  • Create a positive social impact by maximizing the generation of volunteer hours.

Research Methodology

Interview NGOs

Interview Volunteers

At the outset of the project we didn’t know specific goals for the platform of NGOs and volunteer side. So I interviewed several NGOs to understand their needs on volunteering management, the current types of volunteering opportunities and their working modules. 

For understanding the preferences of the volunteers, I recruited 10 volunteers who aged from 15-55 to have an in-depth interview. I have also done an online survey to figure out the volunteering motivation of the users.

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Discovery

Volunteers’ needs and expectation:

  • Beginners want to have recommendations

  • Want to have fast submission and the application could be confirmed within expected period

  • Don't want to disclose their mobile number in a group whatsapp

  • Meaningful images and descriptive volunteering info could gain their motivation to submit the application

  • OLE students need to commit volunteering hours

Problems that NGOs are facing:

  • Choosing volunteers by luck

  • Volunteers always forget to commit the service

  • Spending long time to trackback volunteering hours in traditional way

  • Difficult to consolidate the feedback from volunteers to fulfil the project funder requirements

  • Lack of channels to recruit volunteers

  • Various types of volunteering modules:

    • Group volunteering at one location – e.g. visit nursing home, bazaar volunteering

    • Remote volunteering and individually – e.g. graphic design, typing work

    • Regular / one-off servicing

Highlight Solutions for Volunteers

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Highlight Solutions for NGOs

Unfortunately, due to non-disclosure agreement, I cannot show the product screenshots of this part.

Simplified application approval process

  • For some daily regular volunteering services, NGOs have heavy workload on manage human resources. Therefore, I have designed a calendar viewer for them to review the applicant list; and design some functional tools which were fit to their working process to deal with their daily volunteer management works.

Provide impact data

  • Funders always require NGOs to reach some KPIs. A dashboard was designed for capturing volunteering service data to help NGOs understanding the trend of volunteering development, and to create more successful volunteering programs; resulting in creating a bigger social impact.

Record hours features

  • Fast check-in function / QR code check-in function – this is suitable for volunteers check-in at an event, it can automatically to capture the accurate volunteering hours.

  • Simplified user interface for volunteer who has done remote services to report volunteering hours.

Instant messenger

  • Provides IM function which can automatically create group chat for communicating with volunteers, and helps to protect the privacy of the volunteers, e.g. mobile number.

  • NGOs could also share volunteering post in the IM to target groups of volunteers.

Social Impact

In the past two years, Social Career has been used by more than 300 NGOs and over 10,000 volunteers, resulting in the generation of 100,000 volunteering hours.

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Social Career was honored to receive the Hong Kong ICT Startup Bronze Award in the Social Impact category. All credit goes to the outstanding Social Career team. I am delighted to be a part of this team.

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