Competitive Analysis
Point is relatively new to the world of mobile volunteering. A Columbus based nonprofit, that focuses on making volunteering easier, by allowing user control and freedom through filtering local volunteer events by causes they care about. They make it easy to invite friends to join you on giving back to your community. Golden and JustServe also have standard sharing features, but none of the three take advantage of connecting the user with others interested in similar volunteer events. Neither Golden or JustServe offer a way to filter by cause, making the process to find something you believe in more time consuming.
I referenced Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics during my competitive analysis and rated each competitive app on a scale of 1 to 5. 1 meaning poor use of the usability heuristic, and 5 meaning good use.
Survey
The survey was distributed to a mass slack audience, as well as some private forums (direct email). The survey asked questions regarding how many times within the last year they volunteered, how they find volunteer opportunities, what their primary purpose for volunteering is, what time during the week works best for them to volunteer, and what is the most time consuming part of the volunteer search process.
From participants answers, we understood that people were wanting more clear and upfront information about volunteer events, and the most time consuming part of volunteering was finding an opportunity that worked with people’s schedule.
A key quote and graph:
User Interviews
From the survey results, I selected 5 individuals to participate in video user interviews, where I asked them more questions around their volunteer experience - what their expectations were before volunteering, how they prefer to volunteer, what impacts their decision to volunteer, and what did they like and dislike about the sign up process.
From the user answers, I quickly discovered that I had two very clear user personas. One is interested in volunteering to meet people and build relationships, and the other in volunteering to network and grow professionally.
Through user video interviews, I was able to better understand the challenges and hiccups that people face when trying to find the right volunteer opportunity.