OLIVIA QI


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CREATIVE

  1. Atlantic Music Group
  2. Rhino Entertainment (Warner)
  3. TeenTix merch
  4. Chinoiserie Script

WEB / UX

  1. Alzheimer’s San Diego
  2. Dead Lines
  3. Mouseyverse


    PERSONAL

    1. Posters
    2. Merch
    3. Motion
    4. Concert photography
    Alzheimer’s San Diego
        Jan-May 2025
     TEAM: 3 designers, 5 devs, 2 project leads
    ROLE: UX Designer, UX Researcher
    TOOLS: Figma, FigJam, Maze     Alzheimer’s San Diego is a nonprofit that provides support companionship to people with Alzheimer's and dementia. My team at Nova created a web-based platform for ASD’s volunteers and administrators to log and review activities with a 94.7% average volunteer success test rate.  

    PROBLEM

    Alzheimer’s San Diego lacked a centralized system to log their service hours, submit feedback, and stay updated, and there was no way for administrators to track volunteer metrics. Admin manually emailed volunteers their feedback, and volunteers had to log their sessions by hand at the ASD office. 

    SOLUTION
    My team and I designed a volunteer management platform with: 
    • A user-friendly form for volunteers to record their service hours and notes
    • An administrative dashboard for tracking volunteer metrics and displaying statistics
    • A homepage to centralize announcements and updates for all volunteers



    RESULTSWe implemented and shipped the ASD volunteer management platform with enhancements that reached‬‭ an average 94.7%‬‭ success rate for key volunteer functions: 

    • Viewing Admin Feedback: 90.0% success rate
    • Logging Past Session: 92.3% success rate
    • Planning Future Session: 100% success rate



    How did we get there? 



    COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

    We studied the management systems of Asana and Point to compare their types, target users, and UX strenghts and weaknesses. The analysis aimed to identify best practices and areas for improvement to enhance user experience for both volunteers and administrators.


    KEY FINDINGS

    ❌ User Interface & Experience: Many existing systems require volunteers to navigate multiple steps to log hours, often involving selecting assignments before entering time details. 

    ❌ Overwhelming amount of scrolling: If users input a lot of entries, there’s a seemingly infinite amount of scrolling needed to find a specific entry. It’s impractical for long-term volunteers, and Alzheimer’s San Diego specifically requires volunteers to write detailed notes.    SUGGESTIONS

    ✅ More engaging visuals:  Incorporate engaging colors to differentiate our product from buggy legacy software.  

    ✅ Streamlined entry searching: Give users the option to sort by ascending to descending dates, filter by activity type and manually search to avoid endlessly scrolling to find a logged activity.


    USER SURVEY QUESTIONS
    To inform the development of a more user-friendly volunteer hours logging portal for Alzheimer's San Diego, we conducted a user research survey. We couldn’t get direct access to Alzheimer’s San Diego volunteers, so my team and I instead asked 5 UCLA students who volunteer or have volunteered in healthcare settings. The survey gathered insights into volunteers' current experiences, challenges faced, and desired features in existing volunteer management systems.

    KEY FINDINGS:

    💡Activity-logging struggles: Volunteers report often forgetting to log hours on time and not having a record of their activites, indicating that they want a simpler and more easily accessible system to do so. 

    💡Straightforward data access: Volunteers want commonly accessed information like a summary of total hours and admin announcements to be easier to find and refer to.

    CLIENT COMMUNICATION

    Throughout our process, my team and I kept close communication with our client. After doing user surveys, we asked Alzheimer San Diego’s main administrator what issues she faced in the current system, via a Zoom call. Since none of our team members had volunteered for ASD before or had any nonprofit administrator experience, we gained insights on what kind of data we should display and export for users, in addition to naming and bureaucratic conventions ASD already follows.  


    BRAINSTORMING FEATURES

    Along with the project lead and two other designers, I brainstormed ideas for features based off insights from our competitive analysis, user survey, and client interview. We did our affinity mapping in FigJam.
    Volunteer features
    Admin features

    LO-FI -> MID-FI -> HI-FI WIREFRAMES
    Lo-fis: To begin ideating solutions quickly, I sketched lo-fi wireframes in Figma to map out basic layouts and user flows for both volunteers and admin users. These focused on key screens, core flows, and clarity.

    Mid-fis: Once layout validation was complete, I developed mid-fi wireframes that added more structure and functionality, including interactive components and drafts of a color palette.

    Hi-fis: Finally, I created high-fidelity, interactive prototypes, incorporating the Alzheimer’s San Diego brand guidelines which my team and I expanded upon with a design library. We worked on making sure the typography and color palette aligned with accessibility contrast standards and creating microinteractions for feedback like submission confirmation and hover effects.


    USER TESTING
    My team and I came up with tasks volunteers would have to complete regularly, such as finding a certain resource, reading an announcement, or editing their log of an activity. Then, we prototyped user flows based on these tasks and observed a real ASD volunteer simulate completing our tasks on a Zoom call. We had her think aloud while clicking through each page and took note of her thought process and pain points. 

    © 2025oliviarxqi@gmail.comLast updated 12/9/2025