About

Self-care has always been something important to me. The importance of self-care is immense. It has become somewhat of a mission for me to share what I have learned about how to take control of your life and your time to make sure you keep your stress levels down, your efficiency high, and of course be happy and care about yourself. It is really easy to lose yourself in your work and obligations. Since becoming a professional I have seen the challenges with stepping away and taking time to practice self-care. I created a series of badges I made available to my colleagues after a presentation on self-care. I wanted to inspire them to put themselves first and teach them that taking appropriate time for yourself can help make you more efficient even if it seems in overwhelming in the moment. Enjoy the collection of badges here! 

My role on this project was User Experience Design Lead. I worked closely with mentors provided by Rhubarb Studio, our venture studio from where GoBe was taken to MVP from, with a wonderful team which consisted of a design researcher, two engineers, and a product manager. We also worked closely with the founder and team members from the non-profit. 

My most significant learnings on this project were how to dig deeper with ethnographic research, how to analyze the research, and pull valuable insights. This was also the first project I took from idea to MVP professionally. 

Process

We identified our personas and came up with the five below. Then we located real people closely matching our personas and began ethnographic research, rapid prototyping and testing with these individuals. 

Though several service design frameworks and applications, including journey and empathy mapping, we were able to categorize and organize findings and insights to report meaningful information back to the team and continue to build correctly. 

We began to build along during the research phase; the interviews helped to influence what we built next. By finding out the customer's pain points, we created an MVP which met their most essential needs and by making along with the customer we were able to develop a high use and functioning MVP.

Key Findings

The App 

GoBe's MVP was a web app that allowed for the creation of volunteer groups, the publishing of events, the ability to volunteer and manage volunteers for events. 

We operated using lean and agile methodologies and rapid build. We started building during the research phase to co-build with the insights, and prioritize user needs. We achieved MVP in 4 months and brought on our first users. They immediately reported a quicker and more efficient process when using just the basic MVP. ​

The MVP allowed for event creation and matching to an available group, volunteer group creation,  single volunteer profile creation, and viewing open opportunities by distance. After five months on GoBe, we had built up our MVP also to feature better UI design directed through usability testing and early user feedback, skills input, and we're building out skills-based matching and shift scheduling during my last month with GoBe. 

GoBe Software was created as a web app because our Oscar, Sally, and Caleb (volunteer group leaders and caseworker) personas will work from their desktop using other tools such as spreadsheets or their organizations own software. Our Vicky (volunteers) persona was found to primarily connect over a smartphone which is why mobile availability was vital. 

Additional Images