doGooder: A Social Network for Volunteers

doGooder: A Social Network for Volunteers

We created doGooder as a system to address the diverse needs of those experiencing homelessness. The project was my team’s entry in the CHI Student Design Competition — we presented our design at CHI 2008 in Florence, Italy and won second place!

The Facts

What: A design concept and prototype for a social network targeted at volunteers and volunteer coordinators
When: Fall 2007 and Spring 2008
Who: Myself along with Jackie Cerretani, Sameer Halai, Josh Morse, and Melissa Perez
Where: SI682 – Interface & Interaction Design with Mick McQuaid as well as the 2008 CHI Student Design Competition

The Story

Our team was tasked with designing a system to serve the needs of the homeless. Through interviews with service providers in Southeast Michigan, volunteer coordinators, and people experiencing homelessness, we realized that homelessness is a highly contextual problem, but it is addressed by a vast ecosystem of organizations. Many of these organizations rely on volunteers to enhance their service capacity (one service provider mentioned relying on volunteers to extend their budget by 30%). We discovered that if we could better support these volunteers, we could make a significant impact in the lives of those experiencing homelessness.

By employing a user-centered design approach, including interviewing volunteers, administering a survey, and conducting a literature review, we learned about the many factors that motivate volunteers. In particular, social relationships can play a key role in galvanizing volunteers, increasing volunteer retention, and recruiting new volunteers. From the information gathered, we were able to create a set of personas to communicate our findings and focus our design, as well as several design scenarios that we wanted to support.

We designed doGooder as a social network to connect volunteers with each other and volunteer coordinators. Building on the success and critical mass of existing social networks, we decided to integrate our system with existing social systems. Among the features we included were a recommendation system for opportunities, a way for volunteers to share their stories from volunteering, and a toolbox for coordinators to quickly connect with their volunteers. In order to validate these concepts, we built a high-fidelity prototype using Adobe Flex. We further refined this prototype by conducting a heuristic evaluation to identify areas where we could improve the interaction. Finally, we conducted user tests with 7 potential volunteers to gather their feedback and initial impressions of our design.

My Role

The remarkable thing about this project was how unified and effective our team was, sharing responsibility throughout the duration of the project. I was involved with all aspects of this project from conception to completion. Before we decided to focus on the volunteering space, I conducted a literature review of the health care information problems facing those experiencing homelessness (one of the many areas we were exploring). I also set-up and conducted several of our initial interviews with service providers, volunteer coordinators, volunteers, and people experiencing homelessness. We all participated in our data analysis, persona creation, survey design, low-fidelity prototyping, and heuristic evaluation. As a team, we created wireframes for our final interface design. However, I personally created the high-fidelity prototype, relying on my background in software development. Likewise, our CHI paper, poster, and presentation were all strongly collaborative efforts, with various team members taking the lead on each deliverable.

Artifacts