As the most viewed page on our website, our original dashboard left a lot to be desired. It had very little personalized or dynamic content. It was hard to maintain, and poorly utilized the available space.
The biggest challenge of this project was that it needed to be able to appeal to new volunteers, seasoned volunteers, volunteers with leadership roles, and staff, all of whom have varying interests, capabilities and goals.
This project was being built within the platform that we use for our volunteer portal. This left us with a number of constraints:
I started the project by doing a round of interviews with our volunteers. My goal was to get a better understanding of:
I also provided them with an opportunity to sketch or talk through their ideal version of a dashboard.
Following this research I created numerous designs for exploration. After these initial designs, I met with numerous stakeholders within our organization to get their feedback.
Within the IT team we evaluated different iterations of individual widgets as well as full page layouts, and compared them to heat maps of our current page.
Next I chose to run the designs by participants from usertesting.com. I wanted to ensure that a new volunteer could visit the page and still understand everything that was being presented to them. These participants were able to give me that perspective better than our existing volunteers.
Some projects are a lot more clear than others that they’re “ready”. Particularly because this page was so highly visited, I still wasn’t confident enough at this point to call it done. So I set up another round of interviews with our volunteers. I made an effort to ensure we had a variety of roles and experience in our participants.
While in the end they still weren’t universally in agreement, it was clear we were getting closer and they offered enough of a perspective that I felt confident enough to narrow down the design to a launchable solution.
As a team we reviewed the feedback from volunteers and analyzed a set of updated layouts for specific roles. We also evaluated the way certain widgets would display for different time periods, or for certain roles and scenarios. We also processed the features against their technical complexity.
Though some customization was possible, it required many interviews to determine what content was most universally important and in what order. They generally didn't agree on what information was most important to them, and since volunteers work together, we didn't want volunteers of different roles or ability to see a radically different dashboard. Volunteers often share information and tips with one another and too much difference would hinder communication.
After all of the iterations and feedback, the following principles were the biggest drivers behind the final design.
Taking Action is the Highest Priority - The final design that I recommended prioritized action. One of the pieces of feedback we hear over and over is that volunteers don't know how they can help, so this design prioritized placing the answer to that question front and center. It gives the message that taking action is the most important thing. It is regularly updated with new ways for volunteers to take action, including occasional organizational goals.
Training is Universal - Training was well received by almost all participants, particularly if we could recommend training based on what they've taken in the past or upcoming events.
Staying Informed - We still felt the need to give news a somewhat prominent place on the screen. We also often hear that volunteers don't know what's going on, they're not in the loop, despite our emails and other methods of communicating with them. But in testing, its value was mixed. People already feel overloaded with news, and some have a hard time wanting to process more.
Progress and Connection - Users also wanted more insight into progress and a way to feel like they're more connected to others in the organization. While it's still in the works, we're accomplishing this through a widget that displays the actions taken by local volunteers, as well as an updated view of the forums.
Balanced Customization - When it came to the different roles of our volunteers, these widgets allow us to show similar, but unique content that's most applicable to their role. As an example, a liaison may see training and actions specific to the next lobby drive, while a new volunteer may see training and actions to get them started.
Knowing that we have a small team and there would need to be a lot of new components built on this page, I designed a strategy for implementation. This provided an order in which we could build different sections of the website while preserving the most functionality and minimizing disruption for our users.
Though we're lacking on metrics, qualitative feedback has been universally positive.
