Matching volunteers to foster dogs for a local pet rescue.
Designing a portal to support Atlanta-based pet rescue, Angels Among Us, in better matching volunteers to foster dogs based on their preferences.
Project in collaboration with Rohan Chadha.
DURATION
January 2023 - May 2023 (4 months)
ROLE
UX Designer
TOOLS
Figma, Github, Figjam
January 2023 - May 2023 (4 months)
ROLE
UX Designer
TOOLS
Figma, Github, Figjam
TLDR
Working closely with a team of Product Managers, Engineering Managers, and developers to align product requirements, identify user needs, conduct user research, and develop lo-fi wireframes to hi-fi Figma mockups to support the work of Angels Among Us Pet Rescue.
Working closely with a team of Product Managers, Engineering Managers, and developers to align product requirements, identify user needs, conduct user research, and develop lo-fi wireframes to hi-fi Figma mockups to support the work of Angels Among Us Pet Rescue.
Background
Angels Among Us (AAU) reached out to Bits of Good, a student run 501(c)3 that builds software for nonprofits, with the desire to improve their process for matching fosters and volunteers.
AAU foster matching was previously done using a Facebook group with ~800 users and up to 40 posts and ~25 dogs saved weekly. This brings up the following problems:
- No chronological ordering of the pet posts
- Any user can post
- No formal application, just Facebook and email
Our Team
The development of this end-to-end solution required the collaboration of a cross-disciplinary team working together over the 3 month period to get out an initial MVP. I regularly collaborated with our product manager, engineering manager, and another designer to plan a product roadmap, outline tickets for each two-week sprint for each of 5 developers, create Figma designs for include in each front-end ticket, and review these pull requests at the end of each sprint. The process also involved regular meeting with the nonprofit partner at AAU who was heavily involved in the research and ideation process.
Exploration
The first sprint of this development timeline required us to cast our nets wide in the exploration of AAU’s current process for matching volunteers with foster dogs. This exploration included a group brainstorming with our small team and sending out a questionnaire for user research.
Getting to know the users
From user research, we identified several design considerations to keep in mind as we went into the first design iterations to be developed. They were as followed:
To summarize, the key research findings from this phase were:
- Facebook posts and comments get easily buried. No way to filter posts, unorganized notification system, and too many pages.
- Some volunteers are not regular Facebook users.
- Temporary fosters are not separated from permanent fosters, and categories and traits of dogs are not separated.
- Some fosters feel uninformed about updates and find the Facebook to be unorganized and unreliable.
Design Implementations
The scope of the project included the following implementation goals:
- Creating a feed of posts for dogs in-need of being fostered.
- Each post would be able to be created by an approved admin to reduce clutter and spam.
- Posts would be filterable based on a volunteers preferences.
- Tags to describe each dogs posted, including a percent match rating with each user.
- A direct application to foster a dog using email automation.
- Use Gmail and Facebook authentication to build user profiles consistent with Facebook user base
- Search for and edit permissions for volunteers
There were two primary design flows that I was responsible for mocking up and iterating upon each sprint over the course of the semester. For each, I started out with low fidelity designs so that the developers could have the time to implement, then I got feedback during our weekly design critiques, iterated on designs, and increased fidelity each sprint.
For the first iteration of the welcome and onboarding screens, we wanted to create a minimal and clean onboarding to gather information about volunteers to better help match them to foster dogs via filtering and a matching algorithm.
HIGH FIDELITY ONBOARDING FLOW
The move to high fidelity brought more branding, coloring, and content design into play. We ensured that while the design was mobile focused with large touch targets, it could still be easily and dynamically navigated on the web.
POST CREATION FLOW
As AAU admin, having a web focused view fit in well with their existing pet posting flow. There is simply a list of text fields and dropdown selections used for data entry and then a page for uploading pictures and/or videos of the dog.
INDIVIDUAL PET POST VIEW
The completed pet post includes a carosel, name, bio, and tags with icons that illustrate the most salient characteristics of the dogs that would be most important for potential volunteers to know.
Next steps of the project
I worked as one of the product designers on this project from January to May 2023 before transitioning to role of Director of Design at Bits of Good. As of November 2023, I have mentored a new junior designer through completing all of the product specifications, creating a design system, and officially deploying the product to the nonprofit to use in their workflow.
If you are interested in viewing the live site, check it out at fosters.angelsrescue.org🐶