Citizen Verizon, is Verizon’s plan for improving the world through economic, environmental and social advancement.
Client —Verizon
Agency — In-house
Time— 5 Months
Role—Senior UX Designer
Overview
Verizon wants to do more than just write a check to support the community. It wants to leverage every aspect of its business and its people move society forward together. They strive to connect employees to their communities to drive impact in the places where they live and work:
Verizon made a bold commitment to dedicate 2.5M volunteer hours by 2025 to make an impact in the areas of Digital inclusion, Climate protection and Human prosperity.
Problem
Information on the existing volunteer site is hard to navigate, overwhelming or irrelevant to what the user is looking for. It is not designed to create to encourage engagement and participation.
Goal
The platform’s goal is to help Verizon achieve 2.5 million volunteer hours by 2025, incite more Verizon employees to regularly explore volunteer opportunities and drive increase in commitment to volunteering efforts.
Process
The Design Thinking process was used for this project. It is effective in finding real problems so that we could focus on seamlessly useful solutions.
Target Audience
The Volunteer Platform is meant to serve employees, business leaders, event coordinators and nonprofits. The 3 main focuses in this case study is meant to serve employees.
Research
Employee survey
In collaboration with the strategy team, a survey was conducted to gain more insight of the user’s needs and pain points. The survey focused on validating barriers for navigation engagement and validating hypothesis for strategic desire/needs.
The above confirmed that people were aware and interested in volunteering. We wanted to get to the root of the user’s motivators and detractors.
Competitor analysis
For the competitor analysis the main 3 companies we looked at was Meetup, Peloton and FitOn. All these offered a sense of community, gamification, and encourage frequent use of app/service.
Personas
Personas were created around the data gathered from the survey. Taking consideration the needs and goals of the user but the business as well.
Focus & Takeaways
Based on our findings users enjoy volunteering and want to participate but need a little more encouragement. Also, users have the need to easily find events that are relevant to them with less effort. We’ll touch on the 3 focus points below to help the user reach their goal of finding relevant volunteering opportunities while also helping the business reach their goal of 2.5 million volunteer hours by 2025.
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Personalization Onboarding & Homepage
Give user the opportunity to create a more personalized experience by answering series of onboarding questions to get better insight on his/her interest, skills and needs.
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Event search Rethink volunteer events search
Create a personalized, yet browse-able, experience where the user can easily find relevant volunteering opportunities while also being able to discover new ones.
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Rewards Earn badges for volunteering
Keep the user engaged by rewarding them with badges when they meet the criteria of said badge.
Site map
The site map gives a high level view of where pages live. I did 10 pages but we’ll be going over 4 pages: Home, Event Hub, Event detail, and My profile
Task flows
The task flows map out how the user will personalize their experience, search for events and be rewarded for volunteering with badges.
Task flow 1: Personalization Onboarding & Homepage
Task flow 2: Event search and sign up Rethink volunteer events search
Task flow 3: Rewards Earn badges for volunteering
Wires
Gallery of sketches and wires for the homepage, events hub, event detail page and user profile/dashboard.
Personalization Onboarding/Homepage
In order to personalize the user’s experience, the user is taken through an onboarding process.
Onboarding
User opts into personalizing experience. First task is setting goal.
Once volunteer hourly goal is set, the user now selects areas of interest.
The user is able to select skills and personalize further.
Homepage New User
As a new user, the hero confirms completion of onboarding and user is now presented with curated events based on response. Followed by a dashboard snapshot of their goals, interest, and progress.
Event search/sign up Rethink volunteer events search
Event page was made to be equally curated and browsable. A place where the user could easily find events of their interest but also discover new interests and communities. First the user is is shown recommended events based on interests, then current events, recently added events, then presented with a community that maybe of interest, then the user is able to continuously scroll through events of different categories.
Event Hub
Browse event hub (click into single event) – endless browsing
Advance search
The advance search gives the user the opportunity to narrow down volunteer options.
Signing up for event
The result of the advance search populates then the user is driven to the event detail page where they are able to sign up.
Rewards Earn badges for volunteering
The Verizon employee volunteers have the opportunity to collect a series of badges for their many hours of commitment and dedication.
Badges
In collaboration with visual designer and copywriter, a series of badges were created to reward the user and encourage repeat behavior.
Earning Badge
Once the user achieves a new badge it is revealed on the user’s dashboard and added to their collection.
Final Thoughts
This case study is a bit of a work in progress. I would like to show the full ecosystem of the platform that we created with it’s different use cases and states. Overall, this was rewarding and challenging in the best way. I thoroughly enjoyed being able to gain insight of the user’s frustrations and use that to inform the best user experience for the employees.
Raquel Cruz 