Jan-May 2025
ROLE: UX Designer, UX Researcher
TOOLS: Figma, FigJam, Maze
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.
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
- 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
❌ 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.
✅ 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
“I kept looking at the first table and missed the second table where it said view. Although there is a red dot but I still had to process it so it wasn't straightforward right away”
Adding "notifications" section on home page