Vets to Vets United - Making Connections

Inspiration

After speaking with the Executive Director and Founder of Vets to Vets United, Dr. Terry Morris, our team became inspired by Vets to Vets United’s work facilitating meaningful relationships between veterans and service dogs and specifically, Dr. Morris’s passion for this mission. She relayed to us the struggles she faced building this organization from the ground up, and also expressed an immense amount of pride in where the organization currently stands. Furthermore, she conveyed many different ways that she hoped the organization could grow in the future, which inspired us to use our design skills to help the organization come closer to these goals. In the hopes of increasing engagement and exposure of the organization’s website and therefore details of their work and ways to get involved, we were motivated to remodel their website to draw attention to areas the organization was previously struggling to advertise, such as volunteer opportunities.

What it does

We wanted to get potential volunteers (especially veterinarians) who check the website to end up volunteering. The original website is cluttered with too many web pages, and the need for volunteers is not clear. Our output is a website with an aesthetic UI that would appeal to veterans and volunteers alike and an intuitive user experience. The user journeys of our target audiences addresses their curiosity and questions (e.g. “What is Vets to Vets about? “Should I consider getting involved?”) and brings emotional appeal (e.g. through aesthetics, addressing pain points) to the Vets to Vets and its mission. This naturally leads them to want to volunteer and to volunteer.

How we built it

First, we started by brainstorming as many ideas as we could based on the conversation we had with Dr. Morris. After narrowing down our options, we focused our efforts on streamlining the website and creating a more cohesive design scheme. A lot of our work involved reorganization and redesigning. We used Adobe XD for the bulk of our work.

Challenges we ran into

At first we had no clue how to proceed, so we did a bit of brainstorming and dived into mapping out a wireframe. Additionally, being in different time zones – one of us lives in the Philippines – introduced an added difficulty to our collaboration,

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For two out of three of us, Ideate is our first hackathon. We’re very proud we finished the challenge and made an aesthetic, complete prototype that can be implemented. We’re also happy our product can potentially help Vets to Vets receive more volunteers.

What we learned

Throughout our process, we learned about the many elements that go into making a website specifically designed for a non-profit organization. We had to keep in mind the important functions that these elements served such as donate buttons and mission statements in order to effectively guide users through the website. As a team, it was our first time working with Adobe XD, but attending the workshop was super helpful and educational! We were able to apply the animation skills we learned in our mockup. Adopting the design process we learned in one of the workshops made it easier to approach the process of ideation.

What's next for Vets to Vets United - Making Connections

Getting people to join the website by leveraging existing Vets to Vets events and having aesthetic promotional materials (e.g. posters) with a QR code that leads to the website.