High level Statement

VolHour is a volunteer ecosystem that saves volunteering hours as exchangeable credits for the future. The credit could be future use for redeeming volunteer services hour or purchase goods and services at a discounted price.

Discover

The original intention of the concept "Volhour" came from the observation of the current aging market in Hong Kong or even Asia. More and more countries are facing aging problem with a low birth rate issue. And the trends tend to keep continue.

We have observed that there are plenty of volunteer recruitments among friends or social network in Hong Kong. But most of it do not have an effective channel to spread. Volunteer events used to be some organisation managed activities and have no other way to participate if you have no connection in the community.

There are more and more platforms in Hong Kong that came up to integrate all these opportunities and resources. For example like, Social Career, Time Auction, etc. Although these platform do trying to address social needs of elderly, most of them don't provide any motivation to enhance engagement. And we also see the opportunity that none of the platform are are trying to commercialise the concept with CSR benefit from Cooperate.

The research process

Before we further study about other similar platform, we started to conduct an initial quantitative UX research of volunteering experience in Hong Kong. To better defining the market of volunteers in Hong Kong, our team trying to figure out what is the motivation for them in volunteering and the volunteer habits for them.

These are some of directions we think would help with our understanding during our case study.

How often do users do volunteer work?

Types of volunteers users had participated in?

Reasons for users to participate in volunteer work?

What are the factors to affect users' motivation in participating in volunteer work?

Any platforms/channels that users had participated in volunteer works?

Factors for user to decide which volunteer platform/channels to choose?

And we have collected ~100 feedbacks at the end. And the following result is the key finding.

The habit of volunteering in Hong Kong

The first thing we have notice is surprising. The fact of of almost 85% of Hong Kong people had participated in any kind of volunteering activities. However, more than 70% of people do not see volunteering as "regular habit", no matter of how long is the interval. Which we see an opportunity of building volunteering habit could be one of the vision.

Priority of volunteer considerate for participate in a event

To further understanding how the volunteer priorities the importance of information is the key for building the hierarchy. One thing that is unexpected, Companion landed in a very important role for the consideration. And that is why we planned the Social feature in our next model. Although, we found out "Reward" is not an important role for considerate to participation, many have mentioned about it better have it than not.

Channels of volunteering event

As our expectation and observation, the most common channel of sharing volunteer event is among friends and peers. There are two key question we should look into. Why the online platform is not effective as some offline/ traditional channel. And why peers are so important, even NGO is not as effective as it.

And these question had been answer through our qualitative interview in weeks later after the questionnaire. There is one keyword, "Trust". Some of the volunteer value trust as they are expecting to build up bonding through volunteering. And they are not interest to get into any stranger's event without any social proof.

Other key findings

Priority of volunteering application method

Top 3 value from volunteer to choose their platform

The most attractive reward for volunteering

Define

Right after the initial research and exploration. We started to define the demographic, the needs of targets, and the requirement. The original intention for the project is focus into the young old market. As they might have plenty of time to contribute. Meanwhile they are the service group in the future, allowing them to have better understanding of the value we shared.

The target & end users

However, to considerate a larger target group to validate the concept. Our team figured to define the first target user group to general public of volunteer. As they have the most volunteering experience in the community, and we believe that they can contribute a lot in our design and development. And provide much more talent resources in the pool.

The second major target group are Organiser. They will provide the volunteering events and sharing the resources like existing volunteers. Our team believe it would be a opportunity as a win-win solution. We provide an integrated platform while they provided volunteering resources.

The needs of target

Volunteers: The mentally fulfilment, reward will be extra incentive

NGO/ Organiser: Finding volunteers efficiently and tools to manage participation

The deliverables

Our product would be separated into two parts. The first is the Web Portal for Organiser to upload the volunteering events. The second is the mobile application for volunteers to participate in events.

Develop

Usability Test

In order to gain more feedback from potential users. We organised a focus group and usability test for the initial design. We found 3 participant work in NGO, and trying to understand what information they would be expecting from users.

We firstly prepare some material for scenario, where the participants' role are volunteer Organiser. They are required to use our web portal to create a new event. The material are volunteering event poster in real life that are randomly selected.

The Scenarios

Participants are required to follow the scenario, and trying to reproduce the expected result based on the posters. And we further take few rounds of rests with following up questions.

The actual needs of users

Coverage of scenarios for multiple dates, ranged date

Multiple section for the need of training

Option to set the application deadline

The design turn out with the above new insight that our participants had mentioned.

Design Solution

Stepper for better progression cue

The original design is a straight forward, one page form. Which is fine if there are not much for user to input. Considering the amount of information required now is increase. I design the form with multiple steps that allow user to know about the progression.

New schema for designed data structure

A new interface is designed to allow user to input the optional location and time for an event. Users are able to select either single date event, multiple dates or ranged date. And by labelling these item, volunteer will be allow to pick which sections they are interested.

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