Civic Tech Jobs Website

Background

Hack for LA (website) is the largest chapter of Code for America by project volume, project meetings per month, and number of active volunteers. Volunteers join projects through an onboarding session that is offered twice a month. The current onboarding process is not the most user-friendly as it involves multiple components that most new volunteers are unfamiliar with. Thus, our team is creating an MVP website platform to streamline the process for both the new volunteers (who are looking for projects) as well as project managers (who post open positions in their projects). 

Research To Date

Through user interviews and a survey, we examined what users' motivation was to volunteer with us, and what kind of experiences they were looking for. The interviews were conducted early on to help shape the direction of our product. The survey, which is still ongoing, was ideal to collect greater volumes of data; it was administered every other week following the onboarding of new volunteers. 

An affinity diagram helped us parse our findings. 

Based on research findings, the team improved upon the initial prototype and we performed additional moderated usability testing. These sessions were conducted remotely via Google Meet. One researcher led the interview and others observed and took notes on how the users were working through the flow. We also invited cross-functional stakeholders, like our designers, to also participate and observe, which they were excited to do. 

Examples of our initial prototypes:

Examples of improved prototypes that we used in comparative usability testing:

We presented these in randomized order for each participant to address potential order effect (if everyone saw the left version first then the right version, the right version may be seen as easier to navigate because participants already know what the page is aiming to do). 

Both these pages below were prototypes of the Role Selection page, where volunteers indicate what roles they are interested in: 

These below pages were prototypes of the Availability page, where volunteers indicate their weekly availability for meetings: