Kindness ATM
Mobile App for Spreading Kindness through Volunteering
Client Introduction
Kindness ATM is an organization created by friends and entrepreneurs, Iliana Cogan and Anat Garzon from Miami, FL. Their initiative aims to spread and reward kindness via a real ATM machine that compensates acts of kindness with a selection of gifts. The recipient is then able to pay one of their gifts forward, creating a wide web of inclusion and kindness.
The Kindness ATM team is looking to provide a more accessible and enhanced experience for their initiative by creating a digital platform in which high school students are encouraged to find volunteering opportunities to fulfill their obligatory community hours and are rewarded for their kindness.
Challenge
How might we encourage students to find
volunteering opportunities and spread kindness?
Goals
By building a digital platform for Kindness ATM, I hope to:
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Create an interactive volunteering directory
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Design a streamlined reward system for acts of kindness
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Provide tailored kindness opportunities for users
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Digitize the ATM functionality
RESEARCH
Inspiration
At its core, Kindness ATM aims to sprinkle kindness in everyday life and inspire others through actions. What began as a humble effort to teach people to pay kindness forward, quickly grew into a full-fledged initiative across schools, hospitals and companies in Miami. With time, they managed to create an environment of joy, kindness and gratification wherever they went.
Iliana and Anat are both very active members of their communities and are often regarded as the point of contact for anything related to volunteering and kindness. Over the years, they have also amassed extensive information on the volunteering opportunities available in Miami, specifically for high school students looking to complete 160hrs of volunteering as part of their high school's requirements. Iliana and Anat are eager to make this information accessible to all students and schools alike.
Thus began the idea for a platform that would compile all the volunteering options available to high school students and streamline the validation process for the schools. The online service would naturally still include their Kindness ATM feature to enable users to receive rewards for their kindness and pay them forward to further spread the kindness.
Interviews
Once we had a clear vision of our goals for the Kindness ATM platform, I set out to interview a number of people that fit our target audience. That is, 15-18 year old high school students in Miami, Florida looking for suitable volunteering opportunities in their area to fulfill their obligatory community hours. The interviews were conducted via video chat to fully gauge the challenges our potential users were facing and observe their reaction accurately.
As a result, I was able to conclude a main user persona for our platform that would represent the majority of our users' pain points and clarify opportunity areas for us.
User Persona
Detailed below is the User Persona for the Kindness ATM platform.
MAYA LEVY
Age: 16 | Location: Miami, FL | Occupation: Student | Status: Single
Background
Maya is a high school student in Hillel High School in Miami. As part of her studies, she must complete 160 hours of community service supporting different communities and initiatives in her area. Recently, Maya has been having a hard time finding volunteering opportunities near her, especially volunteering that interest her and feels meaningful to her.
I want to find volunteering I actually enjoy, instead of just trying to get my community hours over with.
Goals
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Complete her obligatory community hours to graduate high school
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Find meaningful places to volunteer that appeal to her interests
Frustrations
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Doesn't know where to get up-to-date information on volunteering opportunities
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Isn't aware of when volunteering events are taking places and often misses out on them
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Finds it difficult to track community hours accurately
Introvert
Extrovert
Thinking
Feeling
Analytical
Creative
Passive
Active
User Journey Map
The interviews helped me hone into the typical volunteering experience for Miami high school students and understand what struggles they faced along the way to uncover opportunity areas for the Kindness ATM platform.
Below is an in-depth analysis of the traditional process that is needed in order to successfully complete and validate their community hours.
DESIGN SOLUTIONS
Sketches
After gathering my insights with the Kindness ATM team, I began sketching out the main interfaces for our users.
Sitemap
Once I had a general idea of the user flows, I structured a sitemap to ensure we were covering all potential edge cases and our users had a seamless experience on our platform.
Low-Fidelity
Mockups
Feature 1:
Daily Kindness Challenge
Feature 2:
Volunteering Opportunity Overview
Feature 3:
Kind-Lendar – Monthly Volunteer Events Overview & Event Description
Feature 4:
Kindness ATM – Redeem Gift
We decided on 4 principal features for the platform and set out to design basic wireframes for each of them.
Final Product
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The wireframes were then presented to potential users and I was able to observe and monitor their reactions to our features and navigation processes.
Below are the final product prototypes for each feature, including new features, based on user feedback and suggestions.
Onboarding
Included an option to select volunteering categories that interest users in order to receive suggestions specifically catered for them.
Daily Kindness Challenge
Search & Organization Overview
Developed the search option further to make it more intuitive and user-friendly, as well as the confirmation message page.
Kind-Lendar & Event Description
Streamlined the search-by-event process so events were easier to find and access.
Redeem & Share Gift
ATM Functionality was redesigned for a more modern look.
Decided to remove Email option for "Pay it Forward" section, based on feedback from users who prefer to interact via messages.
Validate Community Hours
Received users' input on optimal validation process and built out an easy-to-use validation functionality in the Profile section.
Visual Design
REFLECTIONS
Conclusion
This product presented my first opportunity to work with real clients and implement my research findings into a live interface. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting potential users and getting to hear their frustrations throughout the process of completing their community hours. It dawned on me that volunteering should be a task filled with delight, however the process of finding suitable volunteering was too cumbersome for them to enjoy.
It was important to me to create an app that would provide an end-to-end solution, removing all unnecessary obstacles so they could focus on doing good and feeling good.
While this is only a first prototype for the product and there are definitely features that must be tweaked, I'm proud to have led this project successfully to this point.
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