Make Shit Happen
Thinking through human behavior and psychology to develop a "Duolingo" style rewards x charity app.
Co-lead the design team to create branding, do user interviews/research, and create a Figma design-system
Sneak peak at the final designs !
2020 —> 2 years
We were able to push the boundaries of exploring how to enable young people to start volunteering, no matter where they are, or how many minutes they have.
Me and my Design Co-lead Maithe mentored several designers new to their career, and all of them have landed jobs in the product design field!
High school, college & young professionals (ages 16-30) sincerely want to volunteer and give back, but don’t have the time and don’t know where to get started.
The standard volunteering model is still based on the very same career model that millennials are leaving in masses: turn up, do a job, go home, come back and repeat indefinitely. It’s a model that has worked for older generations, but millennials aren’t comfortable committing to this!
An app that allows people to do something in under 5 minutes or less from their phone will convince young people to volunteer. And making this app be at the top of users’ minds during a specific and niche part of their day (like the bathroom) and somewhat addictive/fun (groups & points) will entice them to use it multiple times a week, if not daily.
I did a “hacky” user-test with 15 friends from college. Every day for one week I sent them a link to a Google Doc filled with tasks. I reminded them twice a day that whenever they took their next bathroom break, they should open the link and fill out a task that interested them. At the end of the week, I had them honestly fill out a Google Form to see how it went… here are my insights from the data:
Based off of the feedback from the entire survey, I made some general observations below that will help clarify how our user persona/target audience feels:
Goals:
Help others in a meaningful way while feeling good and productive about themselves
Being able to choose which category of social cause to help
Constraints:
When in a bathroom, people can only use their phone, nothing else
Don’t have much time to help others
Don’t want many sounds (like having to play a video from the bathroom)
Frustrations:
Not remembering to do a task
Having a hard time remembering the charity they helped
Having to change their existing bathroom habits
Currently not satisfied from their usual social media scrolling routine in the bathroom
First, our team each created a few “lightning demos” of other apps. The goal of this exercise was to explain what UX we liked/didn't like from other apps, as we start to think about our own.
We then thought about how we wanted our users to feel and interact with our product and what voice we wanted to carry through our designs:
(Red stickies are the most important idea for each category)
From this, we came up with our Value Proposition:
Make Shit Happen provides something to do on the toilet that’s more fulfilling than mindless scrolling. A Helper’s High in no more than the time you spend in there.
When the status quo needs to be broken, we get to the point to take action, creating a community of driven people — that take their phone to the bathroom — leaving them excited for their next bathroom break
and our Design Guidelines:
Get to the point. We’re not here to waste time
Make it fun. We’re trying to get them excited about *actual* shit
Remove steps. Think: How can we keep people on the toilet
Connect, respond. A community flows both ways
We first had a Miro brainstorming session on what we thought the app architecture should look like from start to finish. Afterwards, we transitioned to Figma to start building and iterating these basic flows.
We ultimately decided on 3 pages: Home/Tasks, Groups & Impact.
We also explored many other brands to get inspiration for what ours could become…
After many more months of ideation, design critiques, and branding sessions, here is our latest look below…
Launch Figma Prototype