One Another Community
The project aimed to rebalance the marketplace of helpers and seekers on a volunteer‑built social network by equipping the design team with scalable documentation practices, clarifying platform specific constraints, and streamlining user onboarding flows to aid platform uptake.
Overview
One Another Community’s soft launch revealed a surplus of volunteers offering help but very few users requesting assistance. To correct this one‑sided marketplace, I first needed to focused on empowering the volunteer design team by putting in place systems and documentation practises that so they could rapidly align, iterate, and deliver the improvements that would encourage help‑seekers to engage.
My Role
As Lead Experience Designer, I focused on establishing scalable processes and comprehensive guidance to drive the volunteer design team’s productivity and alignment. Rather than contributing directly to the breadth of UX work, I built a design documentation hub, acted as a conduit between organisation stakeholders and the design team, and provided UX refinements for the user onboarding process.
Challenges
From the outset, the One Another Community network faced a one-sided marketplace where eager helpers far outnumbered those requesting assistance. High volunteer turnover resulted in gaps within the narrative of design decision making that caused decision making fog and potential design rework, while the technical constraints of Bubble.io necessitated a understanding among designers to prevent mismatches in production fidelity. All this unfolded under a fixed launch window, limited volunteer availability, and increased reactive decision-making.
Constraints
I navigated several core constraints to ensure our solutions were feasible within the launch window:
Volunteer environment:
Processes had to be lightweight and scalable to enable forward momentum within such a dynamic team.Technology:
Designs needed to respect Bubble.io’s capabilities to avoid late-stage issues.Time:
Designs needed to be focused and feasible while also considering future scalability.
Planning
To prepare for targeted improvements, I outlined a structured plan:
Reconstruct & archive:
Create a centralized Google Drive repository for documentation and tracking decision making.Team & stakeholder management: Represented design within leadership and across cross-functional meetings to make sure the design team was empowered to do their best while setting a shared design boundary.
Scope alignment: With the team, identified user onboarding as the area of highest impact for user experience improvements while also empowering the team to seek timeframe feasible solutions to known blockers across the breadth of the product.
Process & Methodology
Initial Assessment:
Reviewed the existing design, development, and design team knowledge platforms.
Identified where opportunities existed within the product with consideration to feedback gained from the products soft-launch and stakeholders needs.
Redesign Approach:
Developed a “decision log” and design documentation archive accessible to all for contribution.
Assessed pre-screen content density, flow, and the sensibility of requested user input for user sign up stages of platform onboarding with a focus on clarity and chunking information to reduce cognitive load.
Outcomes:
Stakeholders and developers where able to easily track changes in design while able to collaborate more effectively with design.
The design team where able to quickly establish rational for decision making made while they weren't present and return to their work faster and with clarity on their next steps.
Redesign of user sign up flow was reflected by faster onboarding times, higher sign up rates, and an absence of negative user feedback.
Acknowledgeable Considerations:
The ability to engage with users was severely limited and within a environment of users engaging based on goodwill, the feedback mechanisms in place likely did not capture accurate user sentiment.
Addressing the void of users requesting assistance was not feasible from a platform specific design level within the launch window timeframe and needed to be undertaken from a marketing and service level perspective. Because of this, on the launch of the platform the number of users within this user group was still limited.
Results & Impact
Through the documentation hub volunteer designers made informed decisions without constant oversight, and confidently drove continued design. This empowerment fostered efficient collaboration and streamlined workflows, enabling the team to iterate quickly under the tight deadline.
By focusing on team processes, knowledge sharing, and clarifying constraints, I enabled the One Another Community design team to lay the groundwork for scalable future releases.
… a little bit more
A moving introduction
While I have studied 2d classical animation and as a hobbyist explored 3d animation I am not an animator by trade.
For One Another Community's launch it was decided that a context setting video piece would help users with better understanding the purpose of the platform.
I animated this video using Unity 3D to accompany pre-recorded narration. The animation was constructed using a blend of 2d and 3d elements, and custom made shaders to produce a slightly sketched grunge look.
Please note: The resolution of images have been intentionally reduced to obscure detail.