We volunteered our time prepping vegetables to be cooked and taken out to seniors as well as learned a lot about LA Kitchen’s Empower and Impact Programs, observation techniques, and interviewed stakeholders and created empathy maps. This is an ongoing project that will continue till the end of the year. Keep checking back for updates. Next session will be held at the end of October.
Role: UX Designer and Research
Platform: Onsite in kitchen facility, online website
Challenge: Learn about the volunteer experience and find new ways to improve user on boarding, customer retention and overall experience of the Impact program.
Solution: Develop a product that will inform, educate and train the volunteer to ensure they understand what to expect from their contribution.
Tools: Adobe InDesign, Google Slides
Timeline: 2 months
Table of Contents
Part 1: Discovery/User Research
Observe
Interview
Synthesize
Personas
Part 2: Ideation
Stakeholders
Volunteers
Journey Map
How Might We…
Ideation
Concept Canvas
Storyboarding
Part 3: Prototyping
Pivot (New Idea, revisiting the importance of Impact Program)
Hypothesis
The Prototype (Testing with real people)
What We Found
Next Steps
Part 4: Final Pitch
-Part 1 Discovery/User Research-
Observe
The main objective of this workshop was to gain empathy through observation of what our stakeholders do. We spent a few hours in the morning in a volunteer session where we learned what a typical session of volunteering is like. In this session, we went through orientation and were given a brief safety lesson about how to use a knife. Once the orientation was through, we were lead to our stations where we would be spending the next couple hours chopping vegetables, juicing fruit, and helping at the wash station. At this time, we were encouraged to ask questions, interview the staff, and observe as much as possible so that we can make notes about them later.
Interview
Once our observations were made, we had a break where we were able to talk amongst the rest of the attendees and some of the staff. We then recouped to make and compare our notes before we separated into small groups to interview our assigned stakeholder. My partner and I had the pleasure to interview Jamel, who was the Volunteer Lead at LA Kitchen.
We had 30 minutes to interview him and get a sense of what his role was at LA Kitchen. He gave us a some insight of his weekly routine from which we were able to pull some of his pain points and make some assumptions of his goals and frustrations.
Here are a few key points that we got from our interview with Jamel:
- He normally works with about 60 volunteers per session.
- He likes to see familiar volunteers because he can spend less time training them.
- Volunteers come for many different reasons, including: class credit, community service and general interest in volunteering.
- We learned about his weekly schedule and routines.
Synthesize
After we conducted our interviews, we spent the next few minutes compiling our notes and further discussing our findings. We put together an affinity map which we then turned into an empathy map that covered what our stakeholder’s role was within the operations at LA Kitchen. We concentrated on key points that involved what our stakeholder heard, thought and felt, saw, says and does. From this, we were able to determine what his persona had pain with and also what he was hoping to gain. We then presented our findings to the rest of the group so that we could share our information.
Personas
Once we developed our notes and synthesized the information into an empathy map, we created a persona based on the stakeholder that we interviewed.
We’ll be using this persona for our next workshop in this series. Looking forward to see what we’ll be doing with these personas!
-Part 2 Ideation-
In this session, we went over the profiles of the stakeholders that we interviewed from part one and put together their profiles to review. We noticed similarities which we used as our main focus.
Stakeholders
Here are the profiles that our group came up with from the interviews we conducted.
Volunteers
As part of the immersive research we did, we came up with a few personas based on the type of people that volunteer. The personas serve as a representation of a segment of demographic, including their goals and frustrations, that L.A. Kitchen will encounter. We will refer to them when we need to base our design decisions on their needs.
Journey Map
We found that volunteers were finding out about L.A. Kitchen through a few different avenues. And once they have taken the initiative to sign up for a session, their journey proceeds as follows.
How Might We…
At the end of part 1, we spent some time coming up with “How might we…” questions that emphasized possibilities of problems to solve. We then took these questions and presented them to the stakeholders to see what their main priorities were and asked them to chose which questions they’d like us to address. We narrowed them down to the following six questions:
- HMW create a better recruitment funnel so volunteers come back again as long-term volunteers?
- HMW better facilitate returning volunteers?
- HMW get volunteers to help promote LA Kitchen, its products and volunteering?
- HMW enhance volunteering recruitment by sharing stories from staff and contributions from volunteers?
- HMW use technology to help onboard, schedule, manage and record data/info/comments of volunteers?
- HMW make the volunteer experience more engaging?
We then broke up into smaller groups and chose which HMW question we’d like to try to answer. My group and I chose #6, “HMW make the volunteer experience more engaging?”
I decided this was the best HMW question that my group and I could address since I remember the volunteer experience vividly. In the session that took place in part 1, I made it an effort to visit as many volunteer stations I could, including all chopping stations, squeezing stations, and even the cleaning stations.
Ideation
We kicked off our ideation session by using an exercise coined by Google Ventures called Crazy 8s. This quick exercise encouraged us to think quickly so that we don’t over analyze our own ideas. Whatever ideas came to mind, we wrote it down and shared them with our groups. We spent about 5 minutes to review all our ideas and took turns to ask any questions to clarify those ideas. At the end of the exercise we chose two of our favorites and elaborated on them by illustrating them and elaborating on what the idea was about and who it was for specifically.
Concept Canvas
After we went over our choices of ideas that we wanted to go through with, we put them into an affinity map where we piggy backed on those choices to further conceive more ideas. Once the piggy back session was over, we took some time and debated which ideas stood out the most. We took those ideas and plotted them on to a concept canvas that showed us the ease and level of impact each idea could potentially have.
Storyboarding
Once the idea was chosen, we spent some time to write up a description of what the process was. We also did a few quick illustrations of what the idea was intended to look like and how users would interact with the new implementation.
The idea was simple. The volunteering experience would be made more fun if we implemented some gamification. So we came up with some ways to keep track of their progress in hopes to encourage them to continue their efforts throughout the day and hopefully return again to fulfill their challenges. The first part of the idea was to create a leader board so that volunteers can see where they ranked among other volunteers as far as how much they contributed.
In addition to the leader board, volunteers are given the opportunity to display their profession and what other skills they can offer to L.A. Kitchen in the form of volunteer hours. For example: if you are skilled in photography, you can offer your services to help the marketing team at L.A. Kitchen by taking product photos or by photographing the new staff for their website updates.
There was also the idea of using a “challenge card” that would allow the volunteer to keep track of the tasks they’ve already completed and could encourage them to do other tasks so that they get to do all the tasks as oppose to just sticking to the popular activities. So washing pots/pans and wiping counters don’t go undone.
At the end of the day they can use their completed “challenge card” to redeem a pin along with their personalized thank you note. This provides closure to the days work and gives the volunteer a sense of accomplishment and gratitude for their efforts to help L.A. Kitchen at the community.
The pins serve as a badge of achievement that volunteers use to show their rank. The more pins a volunteer wears, the more seniority they display, giving them a sense of responsibility to lead new volunteers.
-Part 3 Prototyping-
In part 3, we took some time to go over the feasibility of the idea we came up with in the ideation phase. After considering logistics and requirements to implement an idea like this, we were reminded of the importance of the Impact program and that the priority was still in the tasks at hand. Instead of creating a new way that could potentially distract from the main duties of the volunteers, we decided to to rethink the “HMW” question: How might we make the volunteer experience more engaging?
Pivot
Hypothesis
The Prototype (Testing with real people)
What We Found
Next Steps
-Part 4 Final Pitch-
https://www.danvang.com/open-ideo-l-a-kitchen-presentation/
