helping hands program ux/ui onboarding design
date:
apr 2023
timeline:
10 months
industry:
non-profit
role:
ux designer
team:
marlu martens, dr gary mitchell
tools:
figma, amazon aws
run by the odyssey teams, the helping hand program is a charitable, corporate social responsible team building opportunity where volunteers build prosthetic hands for global recipients. as the lead planner for this annual event on campus, i assisted dr gary mitchell to call for 70+ volunteers across colleges at the university of portland.
besides event planning, i worked as the ux designer alongside a teammate and dr mitchell to address the missing feedback loop between participants, ambassadors, and recipients. we built a simple webapp prototype and troubleshot for aws and figma integration.
problem
there is a missing feedback loop between participants (who built the hands), ambassadors (who travelled to help fit the hands to recipients), and recipients (who receive the the prosthetic hands).
after volunteers built the prosthetic hands, there was no system to track where each hand went or whether it reached a recipient. participants had no way to see the impact of their contribution, ambassadors couldn’t easily update hand-off information, and the organization lacked a unified database to connect the entire journey.
goals & metrics
what does success look like?
because this was a proof-of-concept project, our primary goal was to validate whether a simple digital system could close the feedback loop gap between participants, ambassadors, and recipients.
success was measured qualitatively: creating clear user flows, producing a functional hi-fi prototype, and demonstrating technical feasibility through early aws-figma integration.
while no live metrics were collected, the concept established a scalable foundation for future development and measurable impact.
role
ux designer
i mapped end-to-end user flows for participants and ambassadors, designed and iterated on a mobile webapp prototype, and troubleshot early aws-figma integration to ensure the solution was technically feasible and scalable for future development.
approach
how are we tackling this problem?
requirements gathering
worked with dr mitchell to define user needs and clarify gaps in the current workflow.
user flow mapping
collaborated with marlu to map end-to-end flows for participants submitting prosthetic hands and ambassadors fitting them to recipients.
wireframing + prototyping
co-designed and iterated on a webapp prototype focused on onboarding and tracking touch points.
feasibility + integration checks
troubleshot early aws-figma integration to ensure the proposed solution could scale beyond concept.
iterations
ux architecture
[user flow 1: participants and/or prosthetic hand initial registration]
[user flow 2: finished prosthetic hand submission]
[user flow 3: ambassador fitting prosthetic hand to recipient]
we have included two major users: ambassadors (people who fit the hands to recipients) and participants (people who built the prosthetic hands) in our case.
this is to create a system from scratch that involves processes allowing interactions between sources and sinks, as well as data stores that enable feedback loops to be in place.
final prototype
impact
what did we accomplish?
after a few small iterations, we developed a complete hi-fi prototype as a proof of concept to streamline logistics for prosthetic hand distribution in underserved communities, and helped prepare a scalable aws integration plan.
conclusion
what have i learnt?
this project was one of the first glimpses into how i could apply both ux design principles and systems thinking in a meaningful context. collaborating with our small team, we faced challenges such as funding constraints and shifting priorities. nonetheless, our work has provided a solid foundation for the odyssey teams to address a missed opportunity that we identified.
takeaway
what would i have done differently?
looking back, i would leverage ai and no-code platforms to accelerate prototyping and streamline integration, as it was our bottleneck.
however, the core concept of creating the feedback loop as well as the user flows would remain unchanged, as they are still relevant.