Inspiration: During this pandemic, we need more volunteers and helpers to help the people in need. Resource sharing will help volunteers to become a part of an organization while helping each other. We spoke to a diverse group of volunteers, we realized that they enjoyed volunteering but these food banks do not have a well organized app. Proper interaction is required within the group. Communication is the key, to be able learn about someone's need. Therefore we created this App to establish better interaction and easy access to events for both volunteers and the food organizations.
What it does: This app is build to have a combined advantage of task management with a calendar view of events and the ability to communicate within the group. The organizers can add events and tasks that needs to be done within a time frame. Volunteers are expected to pickup the tasks and complete them. For any questions they can directly message anyone in the team. We take special care to extend the ability to the organizer to announce the instructions during COVID-19, the PPE that will be provided and what the volunteers need to bring along with them. The main intend is to have an organized space to track all the events/tasks and achieve individual or collective team goals.
Process: We started gathering data from online interviews from volunteers and organizations. Once we found out the common challenges they face everyday, we prepped a Miro board to visualize our ideas. Then we moved on to start the design process with Figma. We had 3 main flows which included an event calendar, ability to add tasks and a profile based view. After multiple iterations, we used React Native in front end to develop the UI.
Challenges: We did not know what challenges volunteers faced when joining an organization. Due to the pandemic, it was not possible to physically go to organizations, so we had to take online interviews. Once we started discussing the flow, the most difficult part was to make the process of adding events easy for the organizations. How it should be viewed from profiles and how would we encourage people to be safe. Later on, working on React-Native was a new experience and after a team effort we pulled through.
Accomplishments that we're proud of: We are very happy to be able to design that will help members from non-profit organizations to communicate, view and assign tasks to one another depending on their respective roles.
What I learned: Our team has learned a lot throughout the development of this App! For example, after several users interviews from non-profit organizations, we’ve noticed a trend in how many of them lack the tools needed to stay connected with one another. And as a result, we were able to design and develop an app that we believed would help many of them to communicate with one another through task assignment and event viewing.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
What's next for Ethelon: Moving forward, we hope to implement a messaging function for our members so that they can stay connected within the app and all the information would be available for them to view in just one place.
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