Research

Ethnographic research to gain A Better understanding

The initial idea was to volunteer at my local church’s monthly food bank to unveil underlying problems such as a shortage of LA Food Bank workers, volunteer turnout, and overqualified people taking advantage of the system.

Church staff felt limited because everything was done on paper and by word of mouth

After performing ethnographic research and interviewing church staff about their vision for the future of the food bank, it was revealed that the goal was to actually provide resources for those that needed help in order to promote community engagement. The important questions to ask were:

1. What does the current process of helping a low income or homeless individual look like?

2. What is the current demographic of those seeking help?

3. What are their most common needs and requests?

4. How can we improve the success rate of helping these individuals?

IDEATION

A focus on transportation and eligibility

From answering those questions, I was able to see our problem space more clearly. Rather than just providing these individuals with information, my focus shifted to how we could better support them to achieve self sufficiency. These were the following pain points:

1. Limited access to information.

2. Trouble navigating through forms and qualifications to obtain help.

3. Lack of means to get to the resource location, whether it be money, no knowledge of bus fares and routes or too far to bike.

Since church staff already coordinated rides for those in need by word of mouth, I decided to create a shuttle feature. Our ideation session led us to build on features such as:

1. Selecting categories based on the help needed.

2. Providing a shuttle service

3. Language translation for the target user.

4. Being able to check their eligibility before making the trip.

TESTING AND IMPROVEMENTS

Too much information!

On the last day of the sprint, due to time constraints, I was unable to schedule interviews with any of the homeless or low income people. Instead, I interviewed the main church staff that was responsible of incoming visitors that sought help as he was the most familiar with their needs. The takeaways were:

1. Too much information shown during each listing. The people coming in are overwhelmed already and needed help in the simplest way possible.

2. Onboarding is unnecessary and foods need to be differentiated between cooked and uncooked meals as homeless people don’t have access to kitchens.

3. Reviews are not the most helpful since most people are in desperate situations and can’t afford the luxury of picking and choosing.

Reflection

Due to the nature of design sprints, no revisions were made to the final prototype. But the lessons learned were:

1. Define the right problem to solve with the right users in mind. It it extremely important to keep business goals in mind while designing but also not forgoing user needs. Finding the right balance between the two makes for a good product.

2. First hand experience. Unfortunately due to the constraint of this sprint, I was unable to conduct interviews with real people that come in to seek help. I had to gather all my information about the users from my stakeholders. Going forward, I would love the chance to interview locals that are in need and reiterate my designs according to their insights.