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OVERVIEW
NeighborHelp lets users easily find a “Helper” to pick up items for them at no cost. Incentivized by a points system, Helpers can complete requests to earn a higher level status by picking up groceries for a Requester. In addition, our app includes a simple request form that uses machine learning to provide auto-fill suggestions for additional products that users may like, and this connection helps both users and businesses. Payment is quick and simple to make it easy for people to use the app again and again.
Duration
30 hours (hackathon)
My Role
UX/UI Designer
Key Skills
Mobile app design, accessible design, onboarding, UI design, UX writing, gamification, rapid prototyping
Tools
Figma
NeighborHelp
Helping those at risk for COVID-19 by offering a platform in which they can get their essentials in a safer and cheaper way.
WINFO Hackathon Best Design Winner🏅
DESIGN QUESTION
How might we help seniors, immunocompromised, and vulnerable people complete their errands without leaving their house during the COVID-19 pandemic?
RESEARCH
At the hackathon, I asked around to see what the typical research process was for these rapid hackathons. Unsurprisingly, I found that there is extremely little time to conduct research when you’re creating a product in a single weekend.
Still, I wanted to conduct at least a little bit of research, especially since we were designing for people very different than ourselves. So, we turned to Google for quick access to information on immunocompromised people, best practices for designing for older people, and other questions that came up.
Personas
After our rapid research, my 2 other members and I created some “MVP personas” to synthesize our findings and provide rationale to our design decisions. We created Henry Johnson (a 78 year old who lives alone) and Mary Smith (a middle aged woman with Lupus who just moved to San Francisco). When deciding between options or making sure the app would fit our user’s needs, it definitely helped to refer back to these personas for guidance and justification.
Since we weren’t turning this in to be graded or show to stakeholders or anything, there was no need for the personas to be pretty. For this reason, we were able to simply create them in a Google doc, which gave us more time to spend on the rest of the design process.
SKETCHES
Communicating ideas with others is quite a difficult task virtually and we also had very little time. As such, to be as fast and efficient as possible, we sketched out our ideas right in Figma. While these sketches were not at all pretty, they were extremely fast and helped us explain what we were envisioning in our minds.
From there, we could decide which designs we wanted to go with so that we could build those out fully. In this way, our very rapid sketches served almost as low-fidelity wireframes and helped guide our final prototype without costing us much time.
PROTOTYPE
We chose NeighborHelp’s colors to be familiar, but on the more formal side to promote trust. We decided to make the main font sans-serif so that it was easy to read for everyone, including older folks since they would make up a large portion of our target audience.
As NeighborHelp presented a novel idea, we wanted to include an onboarding process in our prototype to help people understand the purpose of our app. It was also super important to be clear with our writing here and great attention was paid to the words and phrases we used.
One problem we faced in designing this app was getting neighbors to volunteer as Helpers. To encourage people to sign up, we let them choose to get notifications for neighbors they can help out while they’re already at stores and also created a fun gamification system for motivation.
ONBOARDING
HELPER & REQUESTER VIEWS
PROFILE & MESSAGES
REFLECTION
This was my first hackathon and despite hearing about the massive time crunch, I was still surprised at how difficult it was to finish our project on time. We wanted to have time off for sleeping and taking breaks, and so we really had to focus on effective time management. This project was definitely a good way to quickly learn the ins and outs of Figma and practice our design skills!