DoSomething.org
Create an insightful dashboard to assist members in tracking their progress in activism, resulting in a 15% boost in engagement rate.
DoSomething is a non-profit organization based in New York City that fuels young adults from 13-25 years old to make positive changes.
With a driven mission to become a leading youth activism digital platform, my team was eager to support members in every step of their activism journey. Following that purpose, we had the idea of building a dashboard that helps our members set goals and track the impact of volunteering.
Location
Feb — Jun 24
Time
Team
New York City
VP of Product and Engineering
A senior UX Designer
A Graphic Designer
User Interviews
Usability Testing
Affinity Diagramming
Wireframing
Prototyping
UX Design
BACKGROUND
Our members struggled to plan their schedules and keep track of their progress in their civic journey, which decreased the program’s completion rate.
In previous research to see how we could improve our digital platform, our team noticed one pain point that our members encountered when taking activism: Our members found it challenging to plan their schedule and keep track of their progress in social activism because it involved too much mental effort.
With an ambition to be a top digital volunteer platform for young adults aged 15-23, DoSomething is renovating its digital platform to best support members in every step of their civic journey through physical and virtual opportunities.
How might we motivate our members to set actionable goals in their activism journey?
How might we engage our members to track their impacts and progress in their civic journey?
IMPACT
The solution is a dashboard with features to get goals and track the impact.
After 3 months of research, discussions, and iterations, I developed a dashboard with features to effectively support our members in setting actionable goals and tracking their social impacts.
Those features are ground-breaking in the volunteer digital platform, which will lead us to be the #1 volunteer digital platform. By successfully launching these features to our members, I anticipated a 10% increase in member engagement rate, program completion rate, and a 20% increase in donor satisfaction.
#1
+10
+15
Digital activism platform
Currently, no platforms support our members to track goals and impact in volunteering. These features will lead us to be the top 1 digital activism platform.
10% increase in program completion rate
Understanding that one of the factors of motivations is to be able to see the impacts that our members made for their society, we display a dashboard with quantitative data collected from past actions.
15% increase in donor’s satisfaction rate
By summarizing the data on our member’s impact, we promise to make a process of reporting to our donors faster, which increased the donor’s satisfaction by 15%.
DISCOVERY
UX research to understand the current issues
I started by discussing with my manager the problems, expectations on delivery, and the stage of the ideas. I understand that the idea of a dashboard was visualized in Figma.
However, it was early in the discovery stage and there was no concrete research to advocate any design decision. Therefore, I conducted a group of UX interviews on Zoom with 21 members to understand their experience in setting goals and tracking the social impacts they created through volunteering.
Research Goals
How do people set goals and track their impact when volunteering? Is there any need to set goals? What challenges do they encounter?
What factors motivate our members to set goals and track their impacts?
What are their needs and expectations? How do our members visualize their dashboard?
DISCOVERY
After the design workshop, I collaborated with my senior designer to analyze the raw data to ensure we had objective views of the data we received. I gathered all the raw information into a board and grouped them into themes in affinity diagramming.
Start analyzing data with the Affinity Diagram
Insights on member’s motivations and challenges when setting goals for volunteer
01. How do our members set goals?
In my research, our members were divided into 3 main groups according to how ambitious their goals were:
The Big — 10% of our members set very ambitious goals in volunteering aiming to have their social enterprise or win college scholarship
The Medium — 43% of our members set weekly goals to volunteer
The Small — 38% of our members don’t plan for a volunteer schedule.
According to my research, the most 2 popular factors that motivate our members to track their volunteer progress are:
Seeing the impact that they made on other people’s lives
The feeling of completing the volunteer shifts that they planned earlier
02. Motivations of our members to go volunteer
DEFINE
Consolidate our members’ insights into 3 main personas
After grouping my data into themes, I consolidate those insights into personas so that our stakeholders can clearly understand our members' needs and challenges.
The Big are the ones who are very passionate in volunteering and set a very big goal such as winning a scholarship for college or owning a social enterprise.
2. The Medium — 9/20 member set medium goals when taking activism
The Mediums are the ones who volunteer because they feel good about the impact that they made on their society. They plan for their schedule but did not concretely follow the plan.
3. The Small — 8/20 members don’t set goals when taking activism
The Small are the ones who volunteer because they feel good about the impact that they made on their society. Unlike The Mediums, the small go volunteer when they are free. They scan their schedule a day before, sign up for a shift tomorrow, and go volunteering.
01. The Big — 2/20 members tend to set very big goals when taking activism
DEFINE
Map challenges from our personas into their journey
Despite the types that users fall into, they follow these steps in setting goals. First of all, users identify goals, plan to reach those goals, then, take action, and finally reflect on their journey, in which they encountered many issues. In the last step, members said that seeing the impacts on the community is the biggest motivation for them to continue volunteering.
DEFINE
Define the problem statements and distill them into design goals with HMW… questions?
Planning and fitting the volunteer shift into the academic schedule is cumbersome because it involves much mental effort to write down the goals, organize the events, and measure the process.
How might we effectively support our members in planning their schedules and keeping records of their progress?
Keeping up with the weekly shift is difficult because it needs a certain level of discipline and motivation to complete the plan.
How might we motivate or inspire our members to commit to their weekly shifts?
IDEATION
Opportunities for improvements start with competitive analysis
Next, I did a competitive analysis to see how other digital platforms support their members in tracking their impacts and setting their goals in volunteering. I did the competitive analysis on InnerView and Lions’ Heart organization and found out 4 common factors that they use to describe their member’s journey:
01. Total hours since joining
Other platforms calculated the total hours since joining and the progress of their members
03. Rewards and Recognitions
Certificates, rewards, and recognitions from community are displayed on the dashboard
02. Impact broken down by cause areas
Impact by interest with numbers such as numbers of cans collected, books donated, or people reached through campaigns
Lead a brainstorming session with other stakeholders to ideate ideas for improvements with “HMW…?”
After consolidating the data into a problem statement, I used “How Might We …?” questions for a brainstorming session. Then, I led a cross-functional meeting with my stakeholders from the Product, Program, and Communication teams to share the findings and brainstorm improvements using HMW… Questions.
Everyone joined in with different perspectives on the issues, providing a thorough point of view for solutions, which promised many great opportunities for improvement.
IDEATION
Consolidate insights into dashboard features
With all the insights above, I led a meeting with my senior UX designer to redefine the features on our dashboard. Although some of the solutions discussed by our stakeholders contain efforts to redesign onboarding and reportback flow, we scale this project to only design the features for the dashboard.
After that conversation, I define the 4 core features :
Total hours since joining DoSomething
A progress bar that measures the current actions with goals set previously in the onboarding
Quantitative impacts by cause areas with different factors depending on events or challenges that members participated in
Subjective impacts
Thank-you letters or notes from the communities
Pictures of the events
WIREFRAME
Start with paper wireframes and transform them into Figma
From the UX sitemap, I experiment with the features on paper. Then, I adjust the layout in the digital space on Figma. In the wireframes, I make sure to visualize 6 prominent features to assist members in keeping and tracking their goals in activism:
01. Intention Reminder
When members first land on their profile page, they will see their intentions and goals when joining DoSomething. This would encourage our members to continue their journey.
03. A tab shows impact by cause areas
A tab will show the 4 most popular cause areas in which members spend most of their effort taking action.
05. Recognitions from community
This is a place where members can see notes or pictures of changes they made on their communities.
02. Progress bar with growth metaphor
The progress bar shows members' current actions toward the goals they set earlier. When members reach a milestone, there are congratulatory messages and rewards.
Members stated that feeling good about making an impact is their biggest motivation for volunteering, which has me thinking about volunteering as the process of planting a tree.
04. Quantitative Impacts
Each cause area will have different impact factors. This shows how a member impact their communities through the challenges they participated.
06. A calendar of past, current, and future events
A calendar summarizes the dates and deadlines of current and upcoming events, supporting members to plan their shifts.
WIREFRAME
First iteration from internal feedback
I invited my senior designers to the first wireframes stage to ensure we were in the right direction for improvements. With her constructive feedback, here were some changes:
The growth metaphor seemed fun but needed lots of effort to develop the logic for its concept of evolution.
“I love the analogy of telling the story of our member’s civic journey and the growing tree. However, I think this idea will take a lot of effort from us and the program team to define the logic behind that. We keep this idea for the future!
The dashboard takes up a lot of space.
“I think the dashboard function is to support our members to track their volunteering progress and is a part of the member’s landing page. Therefore, I think it should take up a smaller space on the member’s profile page.
WIREFRAME
Second iteration to redefine the scope of the project
Then, I led a cross-functional meeting with other teams to see the functionalities of the features from different perspectives. According to the data team, because of the surplus information we receive from report back, they suggest building a separate page that keeps the data about the past events of our members.
Right now, we focus on fitting the impact dashboard in the small space of the member’s page. The new design challenge is “How might we create an insightful dashboard that helps our members track their impacts on activism?”
Step 1: Optimize expandable card
To fit in a small space, I thought of some expandable card
Step 2: Explore design system
I played around with some design elements from our design system and found cards with pictures and text that effectively visualized the idea of report back.
HI-FI
Develop high-fidelity screens with core features.
From the feedback above, I continuously went back and forth with my senior designer to ask for feedback on the wireframes' functionality and visuals. These was the final screens that I created for the team:
DELIVERY
Final presentations and next steps
From the wireframes, I went back and forth with my senior designers to receive feedback on the important features to keep developing. In the last week of my internship, I presented my final design to my product team, and I received a lot of ideas to move the design forward. Here are some next steps:
01. Offer an overview of member’s impact
The current position of the dashboard will only show the overview of member’s impacts such as total hours of actions or events that they participated
02. Move detailed dashboard to the “Past action” tab
Then, we moved the detailed dashboard to the past action tab to show what our members did according to the cause areas. By doing this, our members can view community notes on every event they participated in.
LESSONS
Reflections on my learnings
Working at DoSomething, everyone is very supportive. Every week, the whole organization launches many cross-functional meetings to give different perspectives and brainstorm together. One of my best memories here is to launch a Pop-Rock to test the idea of design workshop. After the design workshop, everyone sits together to validate the data
01. Presentation skill is a must for every designer.
I learn a lot from Sophie — My mentor to thoroughly present my design. Also, Sophie has taught me to foresee every scenario to prepare for defending my designs in front of other stakeholders.
02. The vision for the product