Hello, I am a senior at UC Berkeley studying computer science and mathematics. I’m interested in how technology can be used to enable communities and address some of the world’s most challenging social problems. Besides technology, I am passionate about all kinds of sports, anything dogs, and almost any genre of music.

About me

As a developer, I was interested in how I can leverage design skills to improve the user experience. I am delighted when I see minimalist designs but, as a developer, I noticed by making a “minimalist” look I am taking away the user’s control and freedom. I wanted to learn a more insightful process to get an in-depth understanding of the users’ values, needs, and experiences. In our process, we have gone through many iterations of our ideas. This was because we had profound findings when talking to users we wouldn’t have otherwise thought of. For our final project, we wanted to create an app for volunteers passionate about environment preservation. When interviewing different users, I found a new need for the app that wasn’t for our original prime user. This changed how we designed the app and who we designed the app for. For the final iteration of the app, we included screens specifically for the non-profits.

The goal when taking this class was to get a better understanding of the users. I wanted to get to how to ask the right questions and wanted to get new perspective that I hadn’t considered before. With my skills as a developer, I have the beneficial insight of what designs are reachable and wanted to test novelty of designs while keeping it realistic. In our final project, we seek an app that would help volunteers, passionate in environmental preservation, connect with non-profits.

 

Helping Tides

We wanted to build an app for those encourage more people to volunteer and provide a central place people can find volunteer events for environmental preservation. We are iterating on a previous project we worked on earlier this semester.

 

 

 

The Target Users

Anyone interested and non-profits involved in environmental preservation

 

 

 

The discovery

 

“I think having an efficient system that allows people to be aware of things that are going on”

 

Before beginning any design, we first conducted user interviews to see what to see what we can learn from those who have been interviewing. Something that was different about this iteration on this idea, I was able to get the insight from the non-profits point of view and see what their needs were. For some of our interviews, out assumptions were confirmed while others we learned new things. For volunteers, something new we learned was an idea for volunteers to have a

  • sense of community between other volunteers when applying
  • forming a medium for communicating between the volunteer and the non-profit.

 

 

 

After many iterations we came up with….DUN DUN DUN DUUUUUN

The Final Prototype

https://www.figma.com/file/OrSHT6DHnRxDjfvfH7FAOS/Helping-Tides?node-id=1%3A7153

 

 

 

The Feedback…..Test, Test, Test

After we finished our prototype, we went back to our initial interviewees and gave a few tasks to see if our app accomplishes what we wanted. The tasks we had our interviewees do were

  1. Go through the Sign Up Form
  2. Different ways of Finding a Project
  3. Application to Apply to Project

After each task, we asked the interviewee a couple questions about their experience. For the most part, we got the results we expected. However, there were some feedback on making the application process more customized.

 

 

The conclusion

Positive results but can be improved

The design of the Helping Tides app had a positive impact on those that tested it. We were able to get feedback from them and if given more time to work on it we would revisit these feedbacks. In addition, we did our own heuristic evaluation to test the usability in the app and found some flaws. Thinking about the volunteers and the non-profit users needs for the app helped us create more thought out features for more types of users. 

 

 

 

 

Check out our design doc for this project. https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/Final-Module-Design-for-Iteration–AqKIP1hpy0PKTYLc5WGFMjkbAQ-Sl6WSDh07MCJHc6QCdrul