For instance, their Action Button allows people to instantly take action (e.g. signing a petition, making a donation) right from an article they’re reading.

We ran user interviews to understand how people went about volunteering and donating, what motivated them, and their overall sentiment around it. From there, we used empathy maps to capture, categorize and prioritize user needs.

The empathy maps helped me outline user profiles to refer to through ideation and design. To support that, I went for a layout that communicates the essence of each persona at a glance.

These forms often count many fields, and sometimes request information users might not be willing to share at that point. Plus, a lot of us dread having their inbox inundated with newsletters after signing up.

Allowing users to navigate by “cause”, as on the sketches above (not by NGO) was a good call- we had noted that donation forms might be too long, tedious, repetitive – and that indeed appeared in the research.

Donating or volunteering makes people feel good about their action, their impact in the world and themselves.

If a feeling of accord between one’s skills and their tasks when volunteering, how about a platform that matches volunteers with events based on their skills and interests?

We focused on the volunteer’s perspective, but volunteering events could benefit from facilitation on the organizer’s side as well.

Giving volunteers direction during events shouldn’t mean they are micro-managed.

What are donations contributing towards, and what impact are they making (e.g. one month of tuition for a young girl to learn how to code)?

It’s much more motivating and exciting to go volunteer when you know that: 1) it supports a cause that is important to you, 2) your specific skill set is needed (versus just anyone with a pulse). Right? It also makes it less tempting for volunteers to bail on their commitment.

To enable the previous points, NGOs need a way to specify what they need: be it certain skills for volunteering events, or target amounts of money for donations.

With good starting points from the interviews, I hand-sketched options in quick iterations. As these stabilized, I moved them to Sketch and iterated on interaction, and how the different components would work together.

I used  Speakable’s primary colors and tone as starting points to create a visual brand that feels like the Action Button’s sister: related, but different.

After applying the new styling to my wireframes, and adjusting where necessary, I finalized the key screens of the flow.

Packaging the design assets and the story behind my feature into a 5 minutes pitch to Speakable’s founder and CEO, Jordan Hewson.

Jordan had amazing feedback to share. For instance, she loved the donation tracker idea. But she also challenged it – how about times when donations go towards NGO’s running costs? Will users get the same feeling of making a difference than if the money had gone towards buying blankets for the homeless people of NY? She also really picked up on the matching of people and causes through skills.

My classmates and I all shared our artifacts and recommendations with Speakable to support future ideations. I’m genuinely excited to see what they come up with in the near future. And who knows, some of our features might be in there!