Caring Coves
Overview
Centralizing the end-to-end volunteer experience: from discovery to registration and event tracking. Caring Cove matches volunteers with personalized event recommendations to make giving back effortless and meaningful!
Timeline
6 weeks, 2023
Role
UI/UX Design Associate
Team
1 PM
4 Designers
Skills
Market Research
User Interviews
UI/UX Design
Branding
Sneak peek of the final design.
Understanding the user
Context
Volunteering is a greatly meaningful experience for all parties involved, whether it's as simple as feeling connected in your community or finding opportunities to build skills and feel useful.
But somehow, even with the abundance of opportunities, many find it difficult to find a volunteer opportunity that suits them.
Understanding user groups
From speaking with 50+ undergraduate students, we discovered that community service openings were…
Sparse
Opportunities are often spread across multiple platforms (e.g. college board listings, non-profits' websites).
Affinity-based
Participation in such events thrives when rooted in shared identity, common purpose, and communal proximity.
Design objectives
Centralizing the volunteer experience, from discovery to registration.
Our user research determined event discovery as the biggest pain point. Whether it be finding any opportunities at all or locating events that align with personal interests, the search for a good match was tedious and often discouraged people from volunteering at all.
The solution
Based off our findings, our team aimed to design a platform that centralized the end-to-end experience of volunteering: allowing personalized event recommendations, in-platform registration and event tracking.
Information architecture
Drawing from user pain points and volunteer experiences, we shaped the platform's information architecture. We defined 6 core pages to provide personalized event suggestions and support in-app registration and tracking.
Ideation
Lo-fidelity wireframes
As the team moved into design, we continually referred back to the collected pain points to ensure the solution aligned with our users' real needs. The first iteration focused on defining page layouts, laying the groundwork for subsequent revisions.
The pivot
From isolated pages to focused tabs.
During mid-fidelity testing, our team spotted a critical friction point: the "Home" and "For You" pages had become parallel pathways to event discovery due to functional redundancies. The similarity of features was confusing for our users, essentially blurring the lines of personalized and popularized event recommendations.
The breakthrough came when we reimagined event discovery in a single destination, and instead split by sub-tabs. By consolidating these flows, we clarified both discovery avenues while eliminating the cognitive toll of very similar-looking pages.
This late-stage pivot, though requiring significant rework, ultimately delivered the streamlined experience our users needed.
The final design.
A digital one-stop for volunteer opportunities: centralizing volunteer event discover, planning, and registration.
Home
Centralized event discovery catered for the individual.
Direct messaging
Access event chats and grow community.
Search
Explore specific organizations and events.
Calendar
Visual volunteer event tracking.
Profile
User preferences, saved events, and volunteer achievements.
Getting to know the user, from onboarding!
Onboarding
Users can personalize their experience with Caring Cove by filling out the onboarding survey. By capturing user interests and location preferences the platform recommends events tailored to each individual.
Personalized event discovery & registration.
Homepage
The home page is split into two tabs: one highlights recent activity, while the other drives event discovery to keep users engaged.
Volunteer event tracking.
Calendar
In a calendar view, users can track their registered and also saved events, filter view by day or month, and receive alerts when events overlap.
Community building among fellow volunteers!
Direct messaging
Users can connect with fellow volunteers, reach out to organizations they are interested in, and actively grow the volunteer community.
Post-project take-aways
Talk early, talk often.
To determine the most intuitive ways to present information and to ensure it effectively met our users’ needs, I learned the importance of frequent discussions with both my team and our users. While our team was frequently communicating within ourselves, more interactions with target users throughout the design process (instead of just nearing the end) could've helped us identify our flow disruption sooner.
Meet the team!
