Smile Trust App
An app to connect people to resources they need - from food, temporary housing, clothes, supplies, and more. This app was part of a hackathon in support of the BLM movement.
Working with the Smile Trust over the span of 3 months to understand the organization's needs and design an app that will cater to their users and reflect their current workflow.
Role
UXUI Product Design
Team of 3
Client
Smile Trust
Year
2020
Who is Smile Trust?
Smile Trust is non-profit organization who goals are to combat the food desert that exists in Miami neighborhoods, and empower people through access to these resources.
A food desert is defined as "an area that has limited access to affordable and nutritious food, in contrast with an area with higher access to supermarkets or vegetable shops with fresh foods, which is called a food oasis"
After completing an audit on their existing website and speaking directly to the team, we learned that the current experience of requesting food was lengthy and inefficient for both the users and the team.
Together, we decided that an app focused specifically on the request management flow would be a great addition to their technology. This would allow all users to submit requests from their phone, from where ever they are.
The current application process was completed through a google form and required manual communication.
Organized needs and goals based on defined personas. Two sides: one for the end-user and one for admin-level management.
Persona A
A homeless man, usually comes to the Smile Sundays once a month but impromptu needs medical supplies.
NEEDS
-
A way to communicate and ask for help
-
Quick access to selecting and requesting
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Being able to mark as "urgent"
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Can select an address based on where he is on delivery day.
PAINPOINTS
-
Doesn't have a stable address
Persona B
Admin level ST team member who manages the requests and network
NEEDS
-
Build a digital network - Share the app to an existing network and transition everyone to digital app and prompt to creating profiles
PAINPOINTS
-
Doesn't have a way to organize, approve, and see all requests see past deliveries
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New people and existing feedback is currently only through word of mouth
One of the key feedback points we received from the team was the importance of communication.
Because the current flow of how the Smile trust team manages requests is heavily reliant on messaging, it was important to keep that familiarity for them to use. We were able to enhance this feature by including system chat notifications for received and completed requests. This mimics the original form of communication but makes it more efficient for the team and informative for the members.
Due to resources and time, one of the challenges we faced was creating a really lean MVP.
We worked with the developer to slim down the features into versions, while still maintaining the user's interests and Smile Trust's goals.
Some of the features that were moved to version two included
- a dashboard for tracking requests and predicting resource allocation ex: popular items, high request neighborhoods, and peak times
- a more advanced inventory tracking with tagging of categories
- an in-app delivery support for efficient distributions
