Washington University School of Medicine: Volunteer Resources

Medical students (many of whom are new to WashU and St. Louis), are excited to plug into local issue areas that align with their interests. But the existing ecosystem of WashU departments, community partners and organizations, ongoing initiatives, and other institutions forms a robust and complex landscape for new students to navigate.How could med students be better supported during their process of plugging into ongoing work around health and wellbeing in St. Louis communities?

Role

Visual Designer
UX Researcher
Creative Director
Product Management

team

Me
4 Undergraduates

time

2 Months

tools

Figma
Procreate
Adobe Photoshop

Problem

St. Louis is an area bustling with opportunities for medical students to volunteer and utilize their skills to aid the community. However, students have repeatedly run into several issues. Existing databases, such as Keystone, are confusing to navigate. Additionally, students often do not have time to do thorough research, and find it difficult to find a program that is a right fit for their preferences, skill set, and schedule, without having to settle.

INSIGHT 1

When students have access to volunteer program resources, they will be able to better gauge how much time they can devote to volunteering.

HOW MIGHT WE

help students find programs that fit into their schedules and specific interests in the medical field?

“Most of the volunteer programs don’t list out expected schedule or time commitment which makes it hard to estimate if I can commit to to that program” –Medical Student A

“A lot of time medical students overestimate how much time they have and overcommit which results in them not being able to show up later down the semester.” –Volunteer Programmer B

INSIGHT 2

Organizations want volunteers but are not effectively advertising themselves to recruit students (via newsletters?)

HOW MIGHT WE

help students find programs that fit into their schedules and specific interests in the medical field?

“Our current outreach strategy is all based on word of mouth and social media networking.” –Volunteer Programmer A

“I heard that lots of students in the past found volunteer programs through upperclassmen. But covid has disrupted that flow. A lot of programs even stopped continuing to outreach to WashU student” –Volunteer Programmer B

INSIGHT 3

Students want to join volunteer programs but it isn’t their top priority. On top of that it is hard to navigate the existing list of opportunities due to how unstructured it is.

HOW MIGHT WE

better connect organizations with interested students?

“We get a long list of random organizations on Keystone, and it is confusing to find anything much less something that is aligned with our interests” –Medical Student B

“I know a lot of medical students want to volunteer, but the current system requires too much time and effort that we end up pushing it off” –Medical Student A

Positive Goal Statement

Through extensive user research, prototyping, data analysis, and brainstorming, we have come up with 2 different ideas that will facilitate the process of students finding volunteer opportunities. The primary goal is to integrate our designs into already existing systems so that busy medical students do not have to take extra time out of their day. Our ideas also aim to make this process more organized and enjoyable, rather than stressful.

Using the research we collected and interpreted in the context of the challenge presented to us, we crafted a positive goal statement, or a vision statement for an ideal future:

WE WANT

medical students

TO

have a more efficient experience of finding volunteer programs that properly align with their interests.

Secondary Research

To kick off our research, our team decided to go on a deep dive on Medical student’s lives and the St. Louis community. We found that there is quite a large and diverse patient base in nearby communities which means that med students have opportunities to get exposure to different and rare health cases. Volunteer programs in the area are either focused specific health issues or cover a broad range of services. Although there is a huge area of opportunity, medical students are under high pressure both academically, financially, and emotionally. This limits their time to reach out and be involved in the community.

User Interview

We sought to hear from WashU students and volunteer programmers to better understand their journey. We interviewed 2 medical students, 2 volunteer programmers, and the Community Service Learning Project Manager. Our team used the following questions to guide the interviews:

Medical Students

  1. What are your specific criteria for a volunteer/ongoing work program? (time commitment, focus on networking(?), location, specific healthcare field, social justice, etc)

  2. What kind of experience have you had with volunteer/healthcare organizations in the past? How were these experiences?

  3. How much help are you receiving directly from WashU’s medical school in terms of finding volunteer/ongoing work? Have you done any research on your own to find programs that are a good fit for you?

volunteer programmers

  1. How are you currently marketing yourselves to students?

  2. What is the current recruitment strategy? and What is the process like?

  3. What kinds of volunteers are you looking for?

  4. What are centralized resources do you provide?

  5. What are some of the gaps and barriers?

  6. How do people access them?

Initial Synthesis

From our research and synthesis of various data points, we identified some areas of challenge and opportunity:

  • Medical students have busy lives, so it is difficult for them to find time in their day to research opportunities.
  • There is too much information to effectively organize on one’s own making it time consuming.
  • It is difficult for students to determine if an organization is a good fit for them or not.
  • Most resources are online; analog resources  can be a fresh and interesting approach

Iterative Ideation

Keeping our goal and problem in mind, we brainstormed a variety of digital and analog ideas. We pinned up each idea and categorized them into larger themes: newsletter, web/mobile app, organized social events, physical system, and career development/shadowing. From there we narrowed down to 5 ideas that we thought could be successful solution candidates and developed them into concepts.

Synthesis of Testing Feedbacks

Much of the positive feedback we received echoed our own satisfactions with the idea.

Prior to receiving feedback, we were trying to create a whole new system of introducing this information-a vending machine. One specific piece of advice that we got from our client which led us to an important realization: rather than creating a whole new system, it would be more simple and feasible to implement our idea into a preexisting system.

This also would be more efficient for students, who would be able to reap the same benefits without having to make any changes to their lifestyle and schedule.

“It should be a system that won’t break if either or both parties are inactive. A lot of these volunteer programs don’t see the need to invest in someone to keep social media presence alive, so it will boil down to the medical students doing most of the work”
– Community Service Learning Project Manager

Solution 1: Chrome Extension

This chrome extension helps speed up and facilitate the process of researching volunteer opportunities on existing databases, such as Google. By giving users the option to filter their results based on their preferences and adding helpful icons to categorize different programs, students will easily be able to find an organization that is a good match for them. Additionally, users will be able to ‘heart’ certain programs that they are interested in so that they can come back to them later.

Prototype

Design Decisions

Simplified window

If the users don’t want to change their preferences, they can turn off the “Detail View” and it will switch to a simplified and cleaner window. They can also check their specific fields of interest by clicking the drop down button. If they want to switch back and change preferences, they can always just turn on Detail View again and switch back to the original window.

Fields of interest Icon

At first, we made several different icons for different fields of interest. However, after some interview and receiving some feedback, we realize this would potentially make too many icon labels appearing on screen, potentially overwhelm the users. Therefore, we decide to use the simple star icon to indicate the link satisfy user’s choices for fields of interest. And users can use mouse to hover above the star icon to see the details about specific fields of interest.

Highlights toggle

We have this feature quite early when Jamie created the storyboard. However, we are actually not so sure if this is necessary in the beginning, since the main idea of our chrome extension is helping users to filter links, and highlights is quite an essential part of it. However, after we test out my page color in the views of different type of colorblind (with the help of Color Blind Plugin), we realized that the highlights are almost useless and even distracting for colorblind people. We think have a toggle that can turn off the highlights will help viewers, especially colorblind users, to have a much cleaner view. And they can just simply check out the icon labels to see if the link satisfy their requirement. Also, during our interview with a medical student last week, he pointed out that even without the highlights, icon labels are very clear indicators of their preference.

On/off Toggle

During the last-day share out, we got a comment pointing out that this on/off toggle is not quite standardized--sometimes, like the toggle we made, the circle switch on the right means it’s on, but sometimes it’s the exact opposite. In most circumstances, this isn’t an issue because we use green and red to indicate the on and off. However, in the later design process when we are thinking about accessibility and colorblind mode, this green and red would not work as a good indicator for colorblind users. Therefore, we added smiling face and emotionless/sleepy face to indicate on and off.

Solution 2: Informational Coffee Sleeve

Since many medical students make daily visits to the campus cafe, we thought that this would be an appropriate location to integrate our idea into. These coffee sleeves contain QR codes that direct students to different databases with information on opportunities in various fields of interest. Every week, 3 different organizations will be ‘spotlighted’ on the sleeve, but the QR code with the database will remain the same.

User Experience

Design Decisions

seasonal sleeve

During certain times of the year, the sleeves will have patterns and volunteer programs that work more closely related to the festivity of that time. For example, during Thanksgiving, there will be turkey patterns with volunteer programs that do something special on Thanksgiving. This is to make the coffee sleeve more engaging for our audience.

color coded by categories

We want the sleeves to be organized in different volunteer interest categories because it helps better tailor the information on the sleeve. If someone prefers one area more than the other, they can request the sleeve with the information they’re looking for. Therefore, having it color-coded allows for better organization. The colors and categories follow United Way’s standards as they are one of the biggest volunteer databases.

poster vs sleeve

The coffee sleeve increases exposure to volunteer programs, while the poster increases exposure to open volunteer positions. While waiting in line for coffee, it would be an excellent time for people to do stuff they have been putting off, such as applying for volunteer positions. When people drink coffee, they don’t want to feel the pressure of doing something they have been putting off. Therefore, the sleeve has a list of volunteer programs that might interest them.

qr code

We want people to access information easily and quickly. The fastest way for someone to get data onto their phone would be through a QR code. Therefore, we have QR codes linked to everything that we want to direct the audience to.

Linktree

The bigger QR code is linked to Linktree, which divides volunteer opportunities into different categories. It was decided to go through Linktree rather than a generic database because Linktree allows for better personalization to our targeted audience, medical students struggling to find volunteer opportunities.

Next Steps

If I were to continue working on this project, I would consider the following steps:

  1. Usability Testing

    Although we interviewed multiple people on their thoughts on our solutions, we didn’t have a prototype for them to test it out. Therefore, our design is mainly based on theories rather than practicality. I want to validate whether our solutions are intuitive since there is a lot of information to unpack and simplifying it down was something we struggled with.

  2. meet with developers/coffee shops

    I want to understand the technical constraints of our MVP since our main focus was on the users’ needs. Therefore, to turn our solutions into reality, I would want to understand the technical feasibility and make tweaks to the design/idea accordingly.

What I learned

Although we spent a lot of time doing research and interviewing users to understand their problem, our initial visual design did not always meet their needs. Since they were based on what we thought their needs were rather what was actually their needs, our designs did not make sense to our users.  As we iterated through, our design decisions are became more reliant on our user’s feedback. Thinking about design as a tool for problem-solving has helped me to better understand the needs of the user and to make decisions that best cater to these needs.

User feedback 🤝 design thinking/decisions

Illustrations from Freepik
Mockups from Mockupworld and Freepik

© HELEN JIANG 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.