DURATIONSpring 2023 (4 months)
TOOLS USEDFigma, Github, Figjam
Atlanta-based nonprofit Angels Among Us Pet Rescue needed a way to better match their volunteers to foster dogs in need of a safe home. Working closely with a cross-disciplinary team, I designed a web-based application to replace their existing Facebook operations with something more robust and customized.
building a relationship with local atlanta nonprofit
Between the years 2022 and 2024, I volunteered as a UX designer at a student run 501(c)3 called Bits of Good whose mission is building software to serve the needs of Atlanta nonprofits. In Spring of 2023, Angels Among Us Pet Rescue (AAU) reached out to us with the desire to improve their process for matching fosters and volunteers.
AAU’s previous matching pipeline consisted of a simple Facebook page where they posted pictures of dogs and allowed volunteers to comment who they were interested in fostering. This format of Facebook channels made the mass influx of dogs being posted incredibly overwhelming for volunteers, leading to poor matches and a stressful user experience for both volunteers and AAU admin.
collaborative exploration
During sprint one of our development timeline, we cast our nets wide in the exploration of AAU’s current process for matching volunteers with foster dogs. This included a group brainstorming with our 4 person leadership team consisting of a product manager, engineering manager, and two designers (including me), as well as developing and sending out a questionnaire to AAU volunteers to better understand their pain points.
What we knew was that AAU’s foster matching process was being conducted using a Facebook group with ~800 users, up to 40 posts a day, and ~25 dogs saved weekly. With this level of activity coupled with a platform that didn’t provide the necessary customization, AAU’s admin was facing three big pain points.
getting to know the volunteers
After talking directly to the AAU team and going through their pain points, we connected with the AAU community of volunteers to get their insight and better understand how this new tool could serve their needs. From these research insights me and my codesigner identified key design considerations to keep in mind before going into the first design iterations. They were as followed:
Apart from these design considerations, we came away from the research phase with 4 pain points that emerged as our targets to address.
- 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 recommendations
the final development scope
I was responsible for mocking up and iterating upon two design flows over the course of the design process. 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.
onboarding volunteers on web and mobile
displaying posts to volunteers
since my time working with AAU...
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 🐶