Caravan Studios
OVERVIEW
Client
Caravan Studios is a section of Techsoup and within caravan studios are multiple apps that are meant to help communities organize, access, and apply local resources to their most pressing problems. My focus was on one particular app 4Bells.
4Bells provides a way to deploy known volunteers to meet urgent, and time-sensitive needs. It first started as a way to notify volunteers who work in animal rescue to be notified when they are given a specific task and are given the option to claim the challenge. It then evolved into other segments such as food rescue, disaster response, and legal assistance of human sex trafficking. Now that people are using it we have found some problems that we need to focus on that range around the organization of the application and allowing new features into the product.
Objective
Simplify the User Experience of the application while adding a new feature into the app for Category Leaders.
Role
Research, Interviews, Information Architecture, UI design, Prototyping, Usability Testing, Branding
Duration
3 Months
Defining the goals of the redesign
Who is using this project?
After using the product and talking to 3 different users I found 2 different types of people using the product. The Volunteer and the Team Leader. With my goal of adding in the Category Leader.
Current Site Map
The biggest problem with the current version of 4Bells was that nothing made sense, even people who use it regularly got lost and were unable to find what they were looking for and it had been a consistent problem even after adding new features and updating the designs. So I created a list of questions to figure out what was wrong with this site map. ​There were many more but these are just some of the obvious questions I had to ask
​1) Why is the "To do" in the "Recent Activity" Page?
2) Why is "Open to Claim" and "To Do" not in the same Area since they are both asking you to do something?
3) Why isn't "Add a Task" and "Create a Group" together since tasks need to be under a specific group
Current Designs
New Designs
I made a number of design decicions based on the feedback I recieved from usability testing. Below are the 3 new options in the bottom menu.
Keeping in mind this app would most likely be for non technical users I tried to keep everything very plain and simple so it would make sense to anyone on their first try.
Everyone agreed it made the most sense to have under
the "To Do" menu
• Tasks the person manages
• Tasks they have been assigned to.
• Add a task
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For the colors of the buttons I thought of them as a traffic light with green being "accept" or "mark complete" and red being "decline" or "remove" and finally for yellow it would stand for "details".
To Do
Activity
For the Activity page I gave the option for the user to filter down from
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• All Activity
So the user is able to take a peak at all Activity that has happened on the app whether it is new tasks created or someone being approved into a new group the user will be able to see it all.
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• Your Activity
This way the user can keep track of their specific responsibilites and no get too lost in all of the other information.
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Lastly I added a button for details so the user is able to view the details of the task at hand.
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My Groups
For My Groups Page this is where they are able to
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• Join a group
• Create a group (Only if the user is a Team Leader)
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Also I split up the different groups based on if the user is a
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• Team Leader
Managing the tasks, assigning the tasks, assigning people as category leaders.
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• Category Leader (this is the new feature Caravan Studios wanted to add)
Managing the category group they were assigned to, assigning tasks, marking tasks as complete.
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• Volunteer
Accepting tasks, marking tasks as complete, declining tasks.
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For the main headline it would have the name of the group, then the subheadline would be the role of the user, and finally the number of leaders, category leaders, and volunteers in each group so the user is always aware of the size of each group.
New Site Map
Finalized Designs
Finalized Prototype
Here is the final prototype I came up with after testing with users recieving feedback and creating multiple iterations.
