JustServe is an organization that facilitates service opportunities for volunteers in countries around the world. Partnering with renown volunteer organizations, JustServe provides an intuitive way for volunteers to find service in their communities through their website and mobile application.

Audience: Individuals and families, ages 8+

Role: UX Lead, Creative Strategy, Product Team Member

Problem: The previous version of the app was navigationally confusing for users, had a broken information architecture, and created a frustrating experience with the volunteering workflow. Additionally, the app was only found in the USA and was provided in English only.

Goal: Create an intuitive experience that aligned better with their brand, provide a personalized searching experience, and streamlined the project search and sign up workflow. The app would be updated to account for multiple languages and would be released to countries through out the world. Accessibility would be at the forefront, especially with the addition of dark theming.

Process and Outcome: The product team, consisting of product and project management, IOS and Android developers, and UX designers, started by taking a step-by-step approach. We began with gathering requirements, usage data, and user feedback to learn where we needed to improve. We then create a strategy and agile release roadmap, designing and building a section at a time.

We began with the biggest issues that our users were having, the search experience been our largest. Search had many technical issues, didn’t align well with the search service for the JustServe web, and was making for a frustrating experience. Approaching the problem, our requirements stated that we needed to provide both a location based and a keyword search experience. There were many difficulties to this approach on the technical end of things. With the help of development, we were able to create an experience that allowed for both types of searching that was clean and free of bugs. Testing the approach with users, we found that it was very intuitive and helped users with the speed of finding a project.

We then began designing the experiences of listing all available projects within a person’s location and then providing an individual project detail screen for users to sign up for a specific project. Our developers were able to implement a personalization service that would help to gather available projects in the user’s geo-location or by a searched location. I made sure to design these experiences so that the calls to action were obvious and also that all needed information was presented first.

In addition to these experiences, I created an organizations listing experience that followed the same pattern as the project listing screens. Users could then find specific organizations to which they could volunteer for organization specific projects.

Next, I created the “volunteered” and favorites experiences. The volunteered screen allows people easy access to a list of projects that they’ve volunteered for and will notify them of their upcoming projects.

Users needed a way to keep track of upcoming projects that they were interested in without committing to signing up. To accomplish this, a pattern similar to the volunteered experience was followed. The favorites screen provides easy access to a list of projects and organizations that the user has favorited.

In order to allow for the many options for personalization in the app, there was a need to create a profile experience where users could update their account information, select preferences from a list of options, manage notifications, as well as provide a place for legal documentation, information about JustServe, as well as a place for users to provide feedback. The profile experience lists out all of these options intuitively, following IOS and Android guidelines.

On the accessibility end of things, the app would need to be updated to WCAG accessibility standards for color contrast and type legibility as well as the implementation of dark theming. Additionally, affordances were taken into account for different language translations across the app.

The app is now available in 8 countries (20 planned) through the Google Play and IOS App stores.

Since implementation, our usage of the app has grown exponentially and the numbers of people signing up for projects has increased by an average of 40% across both IOS and Android platforms.