Davis Community Meals and Housing Redesign

Redesigned DCMH's brand identity and improved user experience, along with building an application that tracked inventory for admins!

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Inspiration

Davis Community Meals and Housing is a non-profit organization that focuses on "Instilling Hope and Saving Lives" of homeless and low-income families and individuals by providing them with housing, food, and human services to help them rebuild their lives. We were inspired and honored to redesign DCMH since they wanted both a tech aspect and design aspect, a good blend of our team, as well as a good social cause we were happy to help.

What it does

A brand redesign and a more user friendly experience for DCMH that would show visitors which items are more in need for them to donate as well as to learn about DCMH's mission statement and what they do.

How we built it

We have redesigned their website to a more modern and simple color palette that is both eye-catching and comforting to look at. We started with research about the current website and ideas that we liked/didn't like about it and drew out ways we could improve their website before deciding on an idea and putting it onto Figma. We had a second team working on the front end of the website with HTML, CSS, and JS and they tried to work on a database through Python that would track their inventory in real time that would also tell people who would like to donate which items are more in need presently.

(Fun Fact: we had our coders learn HTML in two days and try to recreate the website on Figma, our designers are also MEGA rusty in Figma 😎)

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into were the varying experiences of our team. This was the first time for our coder team to do front-end but they still managed to develop this website and database (woooo!!!) while we had two (rusty and/or beginner) designers that don't understand the pain of coding (only one does). It was hard trying to make on Figma, two views, one for admin view to see the inventory and one for public view to see what items we needed the most. We weren't able to get the second part of the website fully updated that we would like in the time span.

(Fun Fact: Also one of our teammates ditched us for his Sunday Shift as Latitude and the other one left us to go to Berkeley for a work meeting womp womp)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was all of our first hackathons so we're proud of ourselves for that!

We (the designers) liked the final design and the coloring of the prototyped website as well as we believed how it effectively showed the mission and goals of DCMH.

"I learned a lot" - Coder

What we learned

We learned that how much we had to communicate with each other to make sure that our product is up to our standards. We had our programmers learn basic web developing tools in two days and our designers were new to Figma or rusty at Figma so relearning/learning these tools was an experience.

What's next for Davis Community Meals and Housing Redesign

If we are allowed to continue working on the website, we would like to create a way for the admin and public view to be different and be able to work more on the website to include more of the original website and navigations. In the future, we would also like to create a mobile web design for DCMH!

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