Teer.ly Mobile UX/UI Case Study

Teer.ly is a mobile UX/UI project I created to address the problems student groups face when discovering and attending volunteer events. For college students, being active in their community is arguably one of the highest priorities besides getting good grades. It’s how they connect with their peers, build experience, and earn recognition from administrators. With modern university platforms, finding events isn’t as simple as it seems. Sadly, that’s just one part of the clunky process student groups must face.

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• Check out the Figma Prototype!

Overview

Tools & Techniques

• Figma
• User Interviews
• User Personas
• Competitive Analysis
• Market Research
• Design System

My role

UX/UI Designer

The Problem

Student groups on campus face frustrations when discovering, attending, and registering for local volunteering events, causing leadership to scavenge for opportunities amidst engagement drop off

Service leaders within student groups have stated concerns with meeting engagement quotas, but that’s just a symptom of larger issues. Taking a closer look at what motivates student groups to volunteer, we can begin to address the potential that lies within them, and what this means for struggling communities.

• 67% of participants within student groups cite the Discovery & Registration stage of the user journey as the most difficult phase to improve upon when it comes to driving member engagement and attendance.
• For an overwhelming majority of student participants, volunteering is considered a great way to stand out among their peers. This helps explain why volunteers are 27% more likely to find work than non-volunteers.

The Hypothesis

Service leaders and members of student groups will find long-term value in a solution that aims to simplify the discovery, registration, and attendance of volunteer events

Within the context of campus organizations, there’s a line of factors and motivations that otherwise wouldn’t be present when creating a volunteering solution. In a general setting, with an organic mix of different user groups, a social phenomenon like being more likely to attend if your friend does wouldn’t be baked into the product’s assumptions and considerations. Information like this is important to keep in mind while exploring user needs and behaviors.

Final Solution Preview

Research: User Interviews

Research participants took ownership of their shortcomings, such as lack of patience for long registration flows and forgetfulness of event details, further informing my design opportunities along the way

Speaking directly with six volunteers in student groups, I came to understand how younger users may have different tendencies that could magnify pain points within the user experience. Everyone can be a little forgetful sometimes, but when your schedule is packed with exams, studying, and even a few parties it can become increasingly difficult to track upcoming volunteer events. To learn more about what causes friction within the user experience, I asked questions such as:

• How many people do you typically volunteer with?
• What’s the most challenging part about being a student volunteer?
• Can you describe how you go about discovering new volunteer events?

To paint a clearer picture of what student groups experience when it comes to volunteering, I boiled down my observations and research into three distinct insights:

• Longer registration flows with required student login consistently contributes to drop off among student volunteer groups
• Service leaders tasked with organizing events for their student groups spend more time on event search and administrative emailing communication than they’d like
• In the context of student groups on campus, recognition that allows them to stand out among other organizations is a leading motivation for volunteering — quotas and beyond

How can we deliberately build solutions that are relevant to the user’s needs?

Using “How Might We” statements, I was able to outline a handful of potential design opportunities tied to real user needs and obstacles:

• How might we simplify the registration process so that time-sensitive users don’t experience unnecessary friction?
• How might we reduce the time service leadership spends on discovering events that fit their criteria
• How might we arrive at a quick check-in solution upon attending an event instead of relying on paper-based or other forms of manual activity
• How might we enable recognition based on student-group performance

Research: Competitive Analysis

Existing solutions tackle the discovery frustrations many volunteers share, but distract users with a “social media”-like experience and fail to support student group initiatives

Due to the lack of solutions for student groups on campus, these kinds of users are forced to aggressively search for events aligned with their causes that also allow for many members to register at a time. Using outdated campus web portals is a popular alternative, but this fails to address ease of check-in and registration.

Furthermore, volunteering solutions with built-in social media capabilities do not align with the goals, or needs, of student groups. Typically, these groups seek traditional platforms, most popularly Instagram, to interact with their online following and share content that goes on to drive member recruitment.

Research: Persona

Design: Early Challenges & Sketching

My early efforts focused too much on trying to incentivize student groups, but once I simplified things I began to carve out a unique offering for my ideal user

Knowing the competitive context in which student groups operate on campus, I began creating systems that would quantify their community involvement and even made some form of a ‘leaderboard’ a key component of the in-app experience. While these were valid, I decided that these could supplement the experience in the background rather than leading it as a core component.

• Competition is natural when it comes to student groups, but it doesn’t necessarily align with the concrete needs users face in the context of volunteering

Turning early sketches into effective experiences that align with user needs

Keeping things grounded in user needs allowed me to see to distinguish beneficial features from distracting ones. In this case, it was crucial that I prioritized the user and their core challenges: discovering, registering, and attending events.

• Compared to the other core components, such as discovery, check-in, and registration, quantifying involvement via competitive systems felt less like a benefit and more like a distraction

Design: Improvements & Solution

Key Takeaways

1. Prioritizing tangible features that serve the user: Many student organizations take a lot of pride in their impact and ability to make a difference. Gamifying this was an early consideration I had, but ultimately it began to take away from the core user intention: lending a helping hand. This taught me a lot about truly advocating for the user as opposed to building a feature that only served as an early hunch.
2. Letting user insights guide the way: From participants, I learned that beyond volunteering itself, there was trouble with simply remembering an upcoming event. While the solution itself relied on simplifying the volunteer experience for students, leaning into this forgetfulness that many students face was a guiding light throughout the project.
3. Going beyond what existing solutions provided: Existing solutions typically tackled one of the core problems my participants faced, and abandoned the rest of their experience. It was important for me to not only design a discovery solution to find events but include a way to let users check in. This creates a circular experience where they can accumulate time as a group, then proceed to the next event with ease.