Ageless Link: A Portal for Ageless Alliance Volunteers & Administrators

UX Research & Front-end Development — Web

01 Background

Ageless Link is a web portal for Ageless Alliance volunteers and administrators. It gives volunteers onboarding support, notifies them on which elder they will be assisting, and allows them to log their service hours. The administrator is provided a dashboard showing volunteer activity across the organization. Ageless Link also allows visitors to refer an elder to the Ageless Alliance program.

How Does Ageless Link Work?

For a volunteer:

  1. After signing up, the user completes a checklist of items to become an Ageless Link volunteer.
  2. Upon approval, volunteers can log in and request to be paired with an elder.
  3. After visiting/calling an elder, the volunteer can log in their hours online.

For an admin:

  1. After log in, the admin sees a dashboard showing total service hours, new applications, volunteer-elder pairings, hibernating volunteers, and more.

Team & Roles

I worked on this project with three peers from my Senior Design class at UC Irvine. We conducted user interviews, wireframing, and web development together. My role was client interaction and sketching.

02 Research

To design a solution that improved the volunteer and admin experience, we had to find out what the issues were for both groups and why. Here is a summary of our research findings:

  • It was hard to keep track of all volunteer-elder matches as they were manually done
  • There was no visibility into volunteer activity for the admins
  • Volunteers did not always log in hours because they had to do so in person
  • Volunteers only knew who and when to visit after receiving a call from a lead member
  • Volunteers weren't always able to drive out to visit the elder — which made elders feel sad and alone — because they found out last minute

User Interviews

VOLUNTEERS

Key Insights & Opportunities

How might we... make it easy for volunteers to log in hours?

  • Volunteers have other responsibilities and driving to the office to log hours can be inconvenient.

How might we... let volunteers know who to contact for assistance?

  • Depending on the situation, volunteers may need to call or message. Establishing a 'help' center can direct volunteers to the right people.

How might we... inform volunteers of their duties as a volunteer?

  • Volunteers are given a short guide to what's expected of them, but establishing a comprehensive online guide may help both to inform the volunteer and to reduce paper use.


ADMINISTRATOR

Key Insights & Opportunities

How might we... assist the admin in matching and tracking volunteer-elder pairs?

  • If we can automatically pair volunteers with elders, we can help the administrator devote her time to other important tasks.

How might we... simplify the process of processing volunteer applications?

  • Applying online would rid of paper applications and make it easier to keep track of which ones need to be processed.

How might we... give the admin visibility into volunteer activity?

  • If we can notify the admin about new applicants, hibernating volunteers, active volunteers, etc. then we can make it less stressful for leadership to run the organization because they would know where they need to direct their attention to.

03 Planning

After conducting our research, we knew to deliver a solution that would streamline the volunteer experience and also deliver the admin insight into member activities.

Sketches

I created the following sketches to outline the volunteers' interaction with the website. These led to more discussions about what we wanted the volunteer to be able to do.

Wireframes

My team and I proceeded to create wireframes using Axure. Following approval from our partner, two of our team members met with five volunteers to test them for feedback.

Volunteer Portal

Administrator Portal

Our partner and the volunteers were pleased and some minor changes were requested. We then moved on to build our prototype.

Prototype

Our prototype was created using Bootstrap and open source code. We used Firebase as our database manager to store all account information and handle our elder-volunteer matching. I've included screenshots of the volunteer account below.

Volunteer Portal

Below is an outline of what we had planned our admin page to look like upon log in. The dashboard is designed so that the admin has more visibility into volunteer activity such as most recent logs entered, hibernating volunteers, volunteer-elder matches, and more. Due to time constraints, we were unable to finish this portion of our prototype.

Administrator Portal

04 Presentation

Part of our project involved a four minute final presentation during the showcase event. I’ve included a few images of our poster and the event below.

05 Reflection

The biggest challenge was identifying the problem because our client had a difficult time explaining what she needed and what she expected of us. She wasn't too familiar with what was feasible, so as a team we had to step in and take direction with our solution. This project taught me that research is imperative to projects like this because in taking the time to investigate the problem, we identified other underlying issues that could have otherwise gone unnoticed.

This course did not have any 'rules' to follow and there were no specific assignments to turn in except for documentation. Apporaching this project with the design thinking method helped us stay on track and focused on our users. If we only relied on the information our clients shared with us without checking in with our users, we most likely would have delivered a product that missed the mark. Also, it was wonderful to know that our clients were very pleased with how it turned out.