Challenge

In conjunction with the British Columbia (BC) Public Service, I undertook an evaluation of BC Parks’ volunteer program. User research conducted by BC Parks had revealed several challenges for volunteers throughout their engagement in volunteer activities and services. Over the course of one week, I was challenged to use this research to identify insights and opportunities to deliver a design proposal and early prototype.

Goals

Primary Objective: Develop a solution that would be feasible given BC Park’s limited funds yet highly impactful in addressing pain points within their volunteer services.

Value to Volunteers:

Understand BC Parks’ vision and how volunteering supports it
Reduce frustration/confusion around finding more information about volunteer programs
Reduce barriers to learning about volunteer opportunities and get help when needed
Reduce anxiety towards becoming a volunteer

Value to BC Parks:

Appeal to a broader audience of potential volunteers
Increase effectiveness of volunteers in supporting BC Parks’ vision and goals
Reduce number of emails/calls to support staff and time/cost to handle them

Process

Understand

Using the existing user research as a starting point, I dug further into active volunteer services and conducted a thorough evaluation of the BC Parks website. Based on this gathered information, I outlined the life cycle for BC Parks and evaluated the pains and gains they experienced at each stage. From this process I identified key opportunities to improve the service and address pain points for both volunteers and employees who run the program.

Insights

Using job stories to breakdown what ideal outcomes would look like for people volunteering with BC Parks, I was able to find where the service failed to help them reach their goals. Within this opportunity space I chose to focus on how potential volunteers learn more about opportunities to volunteer and signup due to limited time and resources. This was accomplished by mapping out the user journey and specific touchpoints involved in becoming a volunteer and then expanding that into a service blueprint by outlining the backstage service experience at each stage.

Design

Having identified some actionable insights to generate ideas from, I created a prototype for the digital component of the service experience - the volunteer section of the BC Parks website. Key components of the prototype were designed first by sketching user flows and were further developed in a rough storyboard of each screen in the user flow. The new user flow followed the same scenario used in the service blueprint and the storyboard was used to figure out how to structure content, calls to action and key interactions.

To better communicate the changes to the content and organization of the volunteer web pages, I created a higher fidelity mockup of each screen. My final step was to create a simple click-through prototype in Invision to deliver a testable design proposal.

Impact

By adopting a service design approach and using job stories, I effectively reframed how BC Parks delivers their online content in a low-cost proposal with potential for high impact in the recruitment stage for volunteers and service staff. Through the experience of incorporating service design methods for the first time, I learned how to quickly take abstract requirements to a testable solution that offered benefits to both end users and internal staff.