MediConnect
UX Design Awards
2024 Award Nominated
NY Product Design Awards
2024 Silver Winner
London Design Awards
2024 Silver Winner
Dec 2022 - Mar 2023, Jun 2024
Volunteer project for China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF)
3 Product Designers:
Ivory Zhao (me👩🏻💻)
Xiaoheng Li
Yuxiang Qi
User Research
UX Design
Visual Design
Usability Testing
Figma
Miro
BACKGROUND
“Please help! My grandma is out of medicine. She lives alone in a tiny village!”
In December 2022, China’s end of zero-Covid led to a sudden rise in Covid cases and medicine shortages, especially in rural areas. Patients began posting medicine requests, while people with extra medicine donated on various social media platforms.
In response, the “Rural Fever-Relief Initiative” under CBCGDF was launched to help deliver medicine from donors to patients. Within 1 week, it received over 100 aid requests across the country. Thousands of passionate volunteers, mostly without prior experience, joined the campaign.
WHAT PROBLEM AM I TRYING TO SOLVE?
The new volunteer group found it difficult to keep up with the rapidly growing medicine requests from the rural patients.
To be specific, poorly structured workflow hinders the motivation of junior volunteers and decreases their task completion rates.
SOLUTION
Short-term: Volunteer onboarding manual
The goal of this phase is to help new volunteers get on track within a short time frame by providing a standardized workflow checklist during their onboarding process.
Long-term: Empower volunteers with efficient and easy donor-patient matching
This solution provides a digital framework to help the volunteer organization manage donor-patient cases during the pandemic and future match-making scenarios. It includes an onboarding tutorial for volunteers, streamlines the donor-patient matching process, and offers an easy call-for-help system.
HOW DID WE GET THERE?
WHO WE DESIGNED FOR?
We didn’t know at first, so we began to learn who were involved in medicine request - donation, and how did they interact with each other.
We contacted with the group to understand their daily work. After this, we have identified 5 types of participants engaged in the process, with volunteers playing a key role in distributing medicine from donors to rural patients. Therefore, we narrow down the scope of the problem and decided to focus on challenges faced by volunteers.
Volunteers are key to the medicine distribution process, determining the group’s performance in collecting from donors and delivering to patients.
UNDERSTAND THE USER
Explore the needs and challenges of volunteers as they collaborate internally and externally
To further understand the procedures that volunteers need to perform a task, their behavior patterns and pain points, we conducted 11 interviews with volunteers, senior volunteers, donors and patients.
INSIGHTS
Volunteers are facing with complex tasks that need repetitive work and extensive fact-checking
After gathering data from interviews, we developed a user journey map to visualize the typical process that volunteers go through from start to finish, including the related collaborators along the way.
01
Volunteers don’t understand what they need to do
Over 85% of volunteers have joined only within a week. Only senior volunteers have experience assisting with the task from beginning to end. The majority of volunteers lack the necessary knowledge of the workflow to proceed, greatly hindering their task completion rate.
💬
“Time was so limited that I didn’t have a chance to understand the workflow before I started the task. And I don’t know who I can ask for help.”
02
Complex task and a lack of a standardized workflow lead to confusion
💬
“I need to call donors and patients back and forth to verify their latest information.”
03
Manual input and case repetition leads to low efficiency
Volunteers gather donations and request information from various online platforms, and manually input data to spreadsheets. This decreases their work efficiency and accuracy. Moreover, one case may be repeatedly processed by several volunteers, resulting in a waste of time.
💬
“The spreadsheets we’re working on are disorganized. Sometimes, my colleagues and I end up doing repetitive work without even realizing it.”
DESIGN OPPORTUNITY
Within a tight timeline, how might we help volunteers to optimize the workflow of distributing medicine from donors to rural patients?
WHAT DOES SUCCESS LOOK LIKE?
We identified 3 principles for our design solutions, along with success metrics that can be measured in user testing.
PRODUCT STRATEGIES AND TRADE-OFFS
At first, the design team came up with product idea as a mobile app that aligned with our 3 goals. We visioned a digital mobile platform that contains 4 main features:
After proposing our idea to the volunteer group, we realized their primary goal was to boost task completion and efficiency ASAP. They were also open to a long-term digital solution for similar match-making cases.
Therefore, we prioritized ideas based on technical feasibility and user need. We decided to implement an onboarding tutorial manual in the first phase for quick problem-solving, followed by developing digital solutions in phases 2 and 3.
The goal of this phase is to help new volunteers get on track within a short time frame by providing a standardized workflow checklist during their onboarding process. We decided to cover following content to make sure the steps are easy to understand and perform.
REDESIGN WORKFLOW
Based on user research, volunteers struggle most with complex tasks requiring calculations, double-checking, and manual operations. To address this, we simplified workflows and provided guidance through automated matching recommendations and shipment tracking, making tasks more manageable.
DESIGN ITERATION
01
Match donors with patients automatically by location & demands
02
Multiple package statuses at a glance
FINAL DESIGN
01
Start onboarding following beginner-friendly tutorial
Easily understand overall workflow, and follow hands-on instruction to complete an example volunteer task.
03
Track real-time shipment to make sure patients get what they need
Receive updates and proof of delivery instead of having excessive double-check with donors and patients.
IMPACT
Our design allows volunteers to easily understand their tasks and perform with more confidence and efficiency (based on 2 rounds of user testing).
💬
“The onboarding manual and this app really boosted my clarity and confidence. Now, I can quickly start tasks and help more people! I highly recommend new volunteers give it a try after joining, and I look forward you launch this app in the future.”
— Lin, Junior volunteer
💬
“We definitely need this platform to manage our work. There’s huge potential for similar scenarios requiring volunteer involvement.”
— Zheng, Founder of the volunteer group