See our prototype for DAA Volunteer Assistant here 👀
We spent a day with Devon Air Ambulance sharing ideas in a design workshop. We were lucky to have with us a mixture of senior staff and volunteers who'd taken the time to give thier input. This combination proved invaluable. Some of the unique challenges facing DAA included:
- Important documents getting lost in the post
- Repetition of tasks done by volunteers and the finance team
- Volunteers wasting time going to outlets where the boxes are still empty or getting calls from outlets when they aren't in the area
- The desire to improve the process but fear of knowing if the process would remain accurate and safe
- The struggle to adjust to a digitised cashless world when a chief source of income is cash donations
- Communicating appreciation to the volunteers who give up their time and effort , but are working remotely and spread out across the county
We spent the day reviewing these challenges and exploring them from different perspectives to try and find the best solution to test.
By the end of the day we left impressed by the feeling that Devon Air Ambulance was quite unusual for a charity in that it had cemented itself as a source of local pride and identity to the people of Devon.
We decided that the “problem statement” to focus on was:
Pete needs a way to minimise the paperwork process so they can maximise their volunteer time
Devon Air Ambulance: Volunteer Assistant
A platform to help volunteers reduce the time spent on paperwork by filling in financial forms digitally and without repetition.
The aims of the solution
- Reduce the time volunteers spend on completing forms
- Reduce errors
- Reduce repetition of work done volunteers and finance department
- Avoid the risk of any further lost documents
- Increase the speed in which the finance team can review returns
- Simple and optimised towards the older demographic who make up the lions share of volunteers
Prototype
We then created static designs using an online tool called Figma. This allowed us to map the rough user journey and provide us with a chance to have rapid feedback on the designs prior to building the product with code.
Throughout our designs we took into consideration:
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The typical age of the user and the implication of that on design:
- Large text and buttons
- No distracting images or text
- Narrow text width
- Simply text
- High colour contrast
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maintaining the feel of Devon Air Ambulance. Through
- Colour
- Font
- Tone of Voice
Below are the main pages we designed to replace the form itself (note: the final designs have changed since these) We aimed to maintain some similarity to the original form so that it feels familiar and hopefully lowers the barrier to entry for users.
The form for recording box collections
The form to detail the bank deposits that have been done
An overview section to show what will be submitted to the finance team
User testing allows you to get feedback from your primary users to check that the product being built fits their needs. This is very important to build a successful product.
The three key points for testing are:
- Have a script which has tasks for them to complete. here is an example of a script which you can use and modify
- Ask for people to give you a commentary of what they are doing, but don't respond to them
- Document their response
Additional recommendations for your user testing:
- Ask user to complete the flow and explain what they are thinking throughout the process
- Make lots of notes. It is good to have someone guiding the user and someone note taking so nothing is missed!
- Try and gather if the user understands the purpose of the app. Are the interactions intuitive, or is the user finding it stressful or confusing?
- Try to understand further if the types, quantity and copy of the questions is appropriate for the audience.
- Does the user feel like this can help make a difference?
- Users may comment on aesthetics but unless the same comments are brought up several times or related to usability (for example, the font being the wrong size for the shortsighted) these comments are usually not important. The focus should be on the users interactions and understanding of the product.
- It might prove useful to further understand the digital behaviours and capabilities of the volunteers. What is their level of comfort with technology; what technology do they use in their everyday life?
Here are some useful resources to look at when completing your user testing sessions:
If this design is move forward for a build sprint it is important to concentrate on key features that both solves the initital problem and implements feedback from user testing.
Our current recommendations for an initial sprint would be:
- Add error handling. i.e. can't choose banking date earlier than collection date
- Ability to edit input from the review page
- Additional journey for adding donation and merchandise
- Further optimise “user experience” based on the findings we get from testing
- Send data somewhere!
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