American Red Cross - Volunteer Connection
The ARC Volunteer Connection Portal is a platform used by volunteers to log service hours, track their contributions, and find opportunities. However, usability challenges made navigation cumbersome, leading to inefficiencies in engagement and progress tracking. Our redesign focused on improving the platform’s usability, accessibility, and user engagement.
Problem Statement
Volunteers struggle with logging hours, tracking progress, and navigating upcoming opportunities, leading to inefficiencies and disengagement.
How might we streamline the experience to make tracking impact effortless and rewarding?
Research & Key Findings
User Research Methods
Interviews: Conducted with ARC volunteers and staff to understand pain points.
Competitive Audit: Compared platforms like VolunteerHub, Better Impact, and Helper Helper.
Usability Testing: Iterative feedback from stakeholders.
Pain Points Identified
Redundant and unclear navigation
Overlapping data between Homepage & My Hours created confusion.
Volunteers struggled to find relevant opportunities.
Inefficient progress tracking
Presidential Award progress bar was small & unclear.
Pending vs. approved volunteer hours lacked distinction.
Lack of engagement for blood donations
No centralized hub for tracking donations & FAQs.
The calendar feature felt sparse and underutilized.
User testing updates
POV Statement: Based on our findings from user testing, we believe that volunteers need a more structured and transparent system to track their volunteer work, with clearer distinctions between approved, pending, and denied hours to better understand their progress toward the Presidential Service Award. Additionally, volunteers would benefit from enhanced support in their Blood Donation journey through clearer impact tracking scales and accessible quick guidance.
Next Steps: We will be proceeding with redesigns for both the ‘Enter Hours’ flow and the ‘Blood Donations’ flow as they work hand-in-hand in driving greater volunteer engagement and service.
Moving forward, we hope to implement the following changes in our redesigns…
Remove the ‘Your Awards’ section on the homepage and highlight a volunteer hour progression bar on the ‘Enter Hours’ section of the homepage.
Enhance the ‘Enter Hours’ page by adding color coordination for departments/committee hours, a status breakdown for submitted hours (approved, pending, denied), and an improved volunteer activity entry system to allow flexibility in logging diverse volunteer experiences (revised inputs: ‘Affiliation’ and ‘Activity Name’).
Improve the ‘See My Impact’ section by incorporating a numerical tracker next to blood drops.
Within the FAQ page, design an AI chatbot pop-up so volunteers can promptly ask questions that may not be answered in the set list of FAQ questions. This will hopefully reduce volunteer coordinators’ workloads.