Two-week three people group project to develop a website for a cause.
In order to redesign the existing Toys for Tots website as well as creating a game app for the cause, we went through the folowing design process. To empathize with our users, we conducted user research. Afterwards, we used the research to define our problem and brainstorm ideas to solve it. Through ideation, we were able to use wireframes to prototype and test our product, as well as consistently improving it.
To figure out what our users need, we conducted research through interviews and surveys.
Because our goal of the interview was to assess the emotional connection people had towards toys and donating new ones to children, we each interviewed people regarding their childhood experiences with a toy, such as asking what their favorite toy was as a child. Additionally, by asking their willingness to donate toys, all of the interviewees agreed that toys were important to children and thus they were willing to donate.
For our surveys, we continued our process of researching the emotional connection people specifically have for toys during Christmas time as well as their willingness to donate.
The survey respondents demonstrated that there is a strong connection for toys and Christmas, and people are very willing to donate new toys to children.
Using the main takeaways from the user research, we proceeded with creating the User Persona for our app: Nancy.
For our user persona, we accumulated our research to develop a user who is settled, loves children, and wiling to donate to a cause.
As a result, Nancy is a lawyer who wishes to give back to the community as much as possible and is always looking for new ways to give to a cause.
To further empathisize with our user, we created a storyboard.
The storyboard demonstrates a situation that involves how Nancy first felt an emotional pull to children after experiencing it on her job.
She specifically looks for a cause that would help children in need, and she wanted to make sure that all of the profits would go directly to the children.
With Toys for Tots, she is able to trust the organization because of its up-to-date website as well as its game app that would help others to join her as well.
In our styleguide, we chose colors and typography that would both be modern and playful to match our brand as well as our new redesign. We kept keywords in mind so that it would be easier to create our design.
Using all of the data we gathered, we created several iterations of the product before creating our final prototype.
Using our desktop user flow, we created several versions of the 3 pages that we were going to create. Our main concept for the pages was to provide as much information as possible while remaining minimalistic.
Additionally, we used another set of user flow for the app. Since we were attempting to gameify the donating experience, we made sure to pay more attention to detail to our user flow.
As a result, we created hi-fi wireframes that best depict the overall concept that we were aiming for: engaging, playful, and modern.
Because it is a game app, in the future it would be beneficial to have another type of reward system, such as a leaderboard curated by points and a social media ranking system, such as using the Facebook open API.
Another way to help the app be more engaging is to incorporate team play. For instance, a company can sign up for the app together and collectively buy toys as their corporate community plan.
One thing the Toys for Tots organization was surprisingly lacking were pictures of children receiving the toys. This is strongly because of a privacy issue, so one way to confirm that the toys were received by the children is to privately send pictures to whoever donated.