Kudoz is an award-winning social platform that offers splendid learning experiences for people with developmental disabilities hosted by volunteers in their community. The online booking application is the backbone of making Kudoz experiences happen. Volunteers that host an experience (Hosts), and adults with a developmental disability who go on experiences (Kudoers), can connect, create experiences and manage bookings all in one place.
Challenge
Kudoz started as a small-scale prototype. Thanks to its success, Kudoz will soon be scaling to new regions, which necessitates a rebuild of the web application to support multiple regions. In collaboration with developers, designers and service delivery I needed to determine the scope, structure and user experience of this new system.
Goals
Primary Objective: Build a minimum viable product (MVP) to launch the new booking platform
Key goals in launching the MVP included:
- Support multiple user types and assign each user to a region
- Support multiple regions and unique membership requirements
- Simplify the user experience
- Reduce barriers to experiences being booked and successfully happening by addressing keeping availabilities up to date, rescheduling and rebooking cancelled/missed bookings
- Reduce confusion in the signup process, particularly with choosing a user role
Process
Understand
Early discussions with the development team and other internal stakeholders revealed a lot of complexity due to a large scope of interconnected components, functionality and membership requirements. To see how everything would fit together and interact with multiple user types and regions, I mapped out several logic flow diagrams. For complex features and booking activities I generated paper wireframes with stakeholders in service delivery to understand their suggested improvements to user flows.
Design
Building off of the team’s insights, I created and presented wireframes for a co-design session with Hosts. The Hosts gave feedback and generated ideas to improve common tasks like creating a new experience, updating availability and responding to an experience request. I lead additional research into best practices along with acquiring feedback from developers, Kudoers and internal stakeholders. This lead to further iterations of wireframes and click-through prototypes for each section of the web application.
By working closely alongside developers as they built features, I was able to consider many more edge cases in the design. This lead to more streamlined functionality that remained within scope and created a more cohesive and consistent user experience between Hosts and Kudoers. This close partnership also inspired my process for the visual design of the application interface as I adopted a modular design approach to align with the front-end framework React.
Implementation
As part of a small team, I aided development by implementing styling on all user-facing pages through CSS/SCSS. Furthermore, I conducted ongoing user testing with Hosts, Kudoers and Kudoz staff to test assumptions around: signup; choosing and booking an experience; rescheduling; messaging and; viewing another user’s profile. Hosts and Kudoers have incredibly diverse abilities and communication styles that pose many challenges to clearly communicating and testing designs.to As a result, I experimented with different testing methods and tools to gather feedback. These included cognitive walkthroughs, playing back and reviewing recorded screen interactions together, generative sessions and digital prototypes.
Impact
This project marked a shift in Kudoz from small, local startup to a successful platform that is ready to expand to new regions, systems and contexts. It demonstrated to Kudoz’s funders and partners the need for serious and continuous investment in technology to support Kudoz’s growth and demand.
Learning Outcomes
- Designing for neurodiverse audiences in digital contexts
- Improving web accessibility by utilizing social research and design
- Effectively scope projects and consider technology in the larger system of processes, services, communication and roles within the design process
- Address both intangible and tangible aspects of touchpoints to build better digital services and platforms