DONATE STATION was one of those projects that you really want to help get right, because it isn't only about the money. Any work done for a non-profit or charity has the potential to impact lives in more ways than just customer satisfaction.

My role on this project was more limited than most I've worked on, but I jumped at the chance to be a part of an idea that could do some type of social good. I only assisted the Head UX Designer by doing the initial user research.

DONATE STATION is an app that connects community centers, churches, charitable organizations and people that want to donate clothing all in the same place. Roughly 700,000 tons of used clothing gets sent to other countries annually¹ because of the sometimes unorganized distribution process of donated clothes.

This service enables people to search which location needs clothing at any given time. Also, distribution centers can connect with each other to send excess donations or request more donated clothing from centers that have a surplus. This way, more donations get to where they are needed.

user research:

Research for this project was fairly routine, but while grouping and interpreting insights from user testing, I discovered some very interesting key points that going forward; will be priceless information if I ever have the pleasure of working on a project that isn't directly connected to money.

user research: personas

User research amalgamated into two district personas; one on each side of the donation process. A mother who wants to give a second life to the clothes her three kids routinely grow out of, and a donation center manager focused on using the donations she gets to maximize the positive impact on the community.

user testing: insights

Each new project has it's own unique challenges and surprises, some bigger and more useful for future work than others. This project revealed a valuable lesson about user patience and tolerance.

Each individual insight is important on it's own, but sometimes they need to be viewed as a whole idea.

The intriguing detail I discovered on this project had to do with the difference between user patience when buying something for themselves as opposed to doing something for someone else with no money involved.

As compared to my past projects, it seemed users gave more than 50% less time to figuring out common navigation problems associated with using a new app. This impatience was revealed in the affinity diagram.

Going forward, this information greatly influenced the design team and challenged them to make the app navigation as simple as possible