Impetus

Youth Corps Singapore recognised the need for innovative strategies to engage and sustain youth volunteerism. Alongside on-the-ground marketing, they aimed to connect with youths digitally through a seamless, youth-centric platform for exploring volunteer opportunities.

My role

I led the entire UX strategy from design to delivery with the support of two design interns who handled visual design iterations and prototyping. Despite the initial ambiguity and challenges along the way, I delivered a well-iterated solution at the end of a 16-week design sprint.

Since this was the first release for Doing Good, under Discover Civic Action, my focus was to build a MVP product on a previously owned software that had limited tech capabilities.

Key insights

I spoke to 37 youths over 8 sessions to explore the underlying motivations and barriers to volunteering, to assess their current attitudes to volunteering and lastly to gauge their sentiments regarding gamification elements.

Alignment

Youths need an alignment between their interest and cause for them to be dedicated in their volunteering journey

Development

Youths want to gain professional & personal development skills for them to stay motivated in their volunteering journey

Fulfillment

Youths need growth, fulfillment and passion for them to be motivated in their volunteering journey

Not every research led to clarity...

I was focusing on quantity here, churning out as many possible designs to solve the problems at hand. I looked for inspirations all around and tweaked the designs according to my requirements.

I went back to the data and analysed it once more, leading to my EUREKA moment. I finally understood why gamification was a concept that elicited ambivalent reactions…

I was receiving mixed signals due to the different youth archetypes

Youth volunteers have varying motivation levels, which influence how they approach volunteerism and affect their attitudes, behaviors, and overall engagement, including their receptiveness to gamification. This insight led to the development of four distinct youth archetypes.

Aligning the team with design principles

The data also gave us insights as to how we wanted the website to look, feel and function which led to design principles so that all of us were on the same page as to the direction that we were embarking on

Exploratory research

Reframed problem statement

How might we create easy, fun and purposeful volunteering experiences for youth so as to increase and sustain engagement?

Easy through navigation

Very early in our user testing process, we realised youths often compared our designs to other volunteering sites such as giving.sg, volunteer.sg. We had to build a product that stood out if we wanted youths to chose our portal over the rest.

This was communicated the moment they landed on our homepage - that we made doing good easy, fun, and purposeful through the range of youth-centric and innovative features.

Fun through gamification

Intention was to a simple, easy-to-understand badges page that was approachable.

Youths preferred seeing a variety of shiny badges all at once, (like a marketplace) as this generated excitement, rather than through progressive disclosure.

Text on this page was also kept to a minimum to ensure that badges visually take the spotlight.
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Purposeful through insights

Youths discover insights about their volunteering journey. They can track metrics such as total service hours and the range of causes they have impacted over time. This not only provides them with a sense of accomplishment but also reinforces their purpose to making a positive impact in their communities.

At the same time, they also can generate transcripts to augment their portfolio, or submit it to programmes like National Youth Achievement Award.

Reflections

01

I’m not paid to politely sit in a corner

I’m the closest source to the needs of the end user, taking into account the countless interviews, user testing, discussions I had ran with them.

It really helps when I bring in the data, or evidence to advocate for the users when their must-have requirements falls to the bottom of the list.

02

Kill your babies when they don't work

Forming emotional attachments to my designs just clouds my judgement and prevents me of exploring other possibilities.

Numbers (or data) don’t lie and I’ve learnt to be more objective in my design decision making.