From Your Neighbor

From Your Neighbor is a non-profit website that allows donors and hopeful recipients to get information, donate, and request medical equipment items from their computers and smartphones. It gives both the tech-savy and the average tech user the ability to quickly navigate the site through the use of an easy-to-use, seamless user interface.

My role: To research, design and test all UIs related to the project. I lead a team of two, collaborating with fellow designer, Diane Gibbs in developing this project and further enhancing the existing website.

Currently, Americans pay $3.4 trillion a year for medical care.

According to the most recent data available from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), “the average American spent $10,345 on healthcare in 2016, with spending per person expected to surpass $14,944 in 2023.”

According to eHealthInsurance, for unsubsidized customers in 2016, “premiums for individual coverage averaged $321 per month while premiums for family plans averaged $833 per month.

For many, costs like this add up quickly, leaving very little for even the basic of needs. When food and shelter are must-haves in everyday household, even the things like equipment to improve health during recovery must be sacrificed. For too many people, making such a choice can be a life and death decision.

Four years ago, a married couple and their two teenage girls decided to create an organization to help aid those who needed expensive medical supplies, free-of-charge. What was “word of mouth” marketing finally called for the use of technology and social media.

New branding paired with an informative, up-to-date website were the next steps to help From Your Neighbor to flourish and serve an ever-growing community.

The Challenge

My tasks for the following project:

• Conduct market research on available DME (durable medical equipment) charity websites

• Design a responsive landing page for the From Your Neighbor website (Desktop,Tablet & Mobile)

• Create a brand that embodies the client’s vision with a clean/simple look while still reflecting the current logo/logotype trends

Research & Strategy

The purpose of this research plan is to discover and study the various situations in which 1.) a recipient finds themselves in need of equipment and 2.) a donor is looking to donate their used medical equipment/funds. This will allow for the research methods, once placed, to phase out any existing problems.

Research Goals

• Gain empathy with both donors and recipients to find out what motivates the donors to contribute and donate medical equipment to assistance organizations as well as find out how difficult it is for charities and individual recipients to receive refurbished medical equipment

• Conduct competitor analysis to discover what other online charity organizations are doing with success

Research Questions (For Equipment Donors)

• What do you do with slightly damaged used medical equipment?

• Would you donate used medical equipment to an outside organization?

• Do you know of any outside organizations willing to take your donated used medical equipment?

• What type of incentive would motivate you to donate used medical equipment?

• What factors would prevent you from equipment donation?

Research Questions (For Equipment Recipients)

• Are you uninsured? If so, how long have you had this status?

• If insured, are you aware of what your insurance covers in the form of medical equipment?

• What are your concerns about receiving donated used medical equipment?

• What do you do with your used medical equipment when it is no longer needed?

• How do you seek donated used medical equipment?

Research Methodology

• Competitor Analysis

• Donor/Recipient Interviews

• Donor/Recipient Surveys

Gaining Empathy

To connect with potential FYN users (gaining empathy), I asked several equipment donors questions about their current donation experiences and methods. I asked equipment recipients, about their current situations and what other options they had to receive the medical equipment and the basic ease/difficulty of acquiring the equipment. The interviews (link features two of five) were very instructional helped greatly in adding new elements to the website (strongly supported with my competitor analysis).

Creating A Persona

It was important to understand the needs of both users in effort to develop a functional FYN website. Data collected from user interviews and surveys helped bring me to understand and empathize with both the donor and recipient groups. From that information, I was able to craft a "typical" user for the website - the archetypes of the provider and the helper. 

• Donna wants to clear her home and have her donation reused. All the marks of a perfect persona for our donor.

• Curt is a middle-class, blue-collar worker with a wife who is a stay-at-home mom of two young children. When a major medical incident (not-covered by insurance) temporarily places the sole source of household income out of work, Curt finds himself as the recipient persona.

  Both of these personas exemplify the type of users that From Your Neighbor is targeting for their equipment recovery and distribution service.

Empathy Map

An empathy map was then created based on the user persona. This allows me to gain a deeper insight into the users and/or donors (in this case the persona of the previously mentioned Donna from above).

Interaction Design

 Site Map

I created a sitemap to show the relationship between the content on the FYN website. The map documents the various pages throughout the app and the user paths to and from them. I took my original “pencil and paper” sketch and did a redo through Adobe Illustrator. When it comes to clearly conveying the layout of a website, nice and neat is the way to go with your visual assets.

Wireframes

I sometimes prefer starting out with low-fidelity wireframes. It helps in thinking through the structure of the website layout. I generally always start out using my sketch pad to iterate through the early stages of the design process. After I capture a few solid sketches, I go towards a more advanced wireframing. In this case, I utilized the online wireframing tool, Balsamiq - for the perfect digital/hand-drawn look.

Prototyping

User Testing

To understand what a shopping experience looks like with a grocery application, it was important to see how users went about their process and if they could navigate the FYN website (Especially for donation services and volunteer sign-ups). I recreated the websites through Adobe XD, making prototypes for the client to interact with real-time. Once approved, it was time to deploy three user tests on two of my favorite remote user research platforms, Helio and Usabilityhub, where we discovered the test users ran into an issues with scheduling pickups for different types of donations. Through testing, we found the need for integration of a 3rd party app (Acuity Online Appointments) to solve the problem of separating the type of donors to specific pages on the website.

I had four different users test out the prototype created through Adobe XD where I could gauge ease of use and see if they could complete a simple task of submitting a financial donation to the website . All users successfully made a donation without any “pains”.

User Interface Design

UI Kit

Once all the branding was complete and the UI appeared solid, I crafted UI Kits (neatly packaged UI design patterns) to make life easier for any future designers working on the branding for From Your Neighbor. 

Final User Surveys

The client was set on crafting a “tagline” under the main logo, but wasn’t quite sure how she wanted the wording to go. She settled on using either “Gently Used. Love Renewed.” or “Gently Used. Community Renewed.”

Because she and her co-founder couldn’t agree on which one to go with, we all decided to set it up as a survey and get the opinion of the general public. I used Google Forms to conduct the survey.

Final Product

Learnings