Start Giving Local 🏃‍♀️

Overview

Start Giving Local is a nonprofit community that encourages people to participate in endurance events, fundraise for charity, and support their local community in the process. They support local communities by promoting wellness, foster inclusion, and innovation and empowering people to support a cause. We partnered with Start Giving Local through University of California Irvine’s Human Computer Interaction Design program as part of our Capstone Project. We worked closely with our client Executive Director & Founder of Start Giving Local Kelly O’Connell, and other key board members throughout the project.

My Role
Project Manager & Product Designer

Timeframe
6 Months

The Challenge

Start Giving Local came to us with a problem that was directly impacting their business and local communities around the world in affect to COVID-19. Working as a team of 5 and our client Kelly, we formed our initial problem statement, making it easy for athletes to fundraise on behalf of nonprofits to self-service and sign up to support their communities. The majority of their fundraising and events were done in person. Because of the restrictions of the pandemic, how could we create an environment to help athletes during COVID-19 (and after) create a healthier lifestyle and fundraise for charities to support their local communities. We were looking to develop a product that would help in the immediate and long term help promote their business.

The Process

Over the course of 6 months, we broke our time into 3 months on research, and 3 months on design and development. We choose to use the double diamond method in order to validate our research findings, and pressure test our product to our main problem statement. During the first 3 months of research we conducted Secondary Research, Primary Research, and Research Synthesis, and identifying user needs. My roles in the project were the project manager, researcher, and UX designer. As the project manager, I was in charge of planning meetings and agendas, weekly client checkins and stakeholder meetings, sprint planning and ticket assignments, organizing deliverables for handoff. During the project as a product designer, I worked on the competitive analysis, survey, diary study, interviews, research synthesis, personas, identifying user needs and goals, developed wireframes, lo-fi and hi-fi usability testing, and building the prototype.

Research and Synthesis

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Personas & User Journeys

The Solution

Working closely with our client and stakeholders we developed a concept for a Start Giving Local App that they could use to encourage people to track their training, give back to charities, and their local communities. We identified three pillars for the Start Giving Local App, training, community, and fundraising. From our research we found people needed motivation from their friends and family, and accomplished goals when training for an event. We developed an on-boarding program that focused on personalizing a training plan and schedule dependent on that user’s specific needs, and the kind of fitness event they were training for (running, biking, swimming, walking). To address the issue of the pandemic, in our training and community sections on the app we had ‘Virtual Races’ were you could invite friends to join you in a virtual race where you would run on your own or invite friends. Lastly, while you trained you can easily choose a charity to support to share with friends and family.

App Final Product

The Results

Conducting a large portion of our project to research from the beginning really help us find our main insights and deliver solutions to our targeted users. We received positive feedback from users from our hi-fidelity user tests. Our client and stakeholders were very happy with our product and will use our research and designs to build the Start Giving Local App with a development internship class. View full prototype here.

“This app would be greatly beneficial for me to be healthy, to keep motivated, and active. To help me achieve things that I thought I could never have done and be part of a community that is bigger than myself and being healthier and happier. ”

— User Tester