How to build a meaningful platform to help travelers discover volunteer programs around the world?

What is Green Turtle?

Green Turtle is a mobile app to help people plan meaningful travel experiences by connecting them to local volunteer communities worldwide. While planning their next trip, travelers enter their skills into the Green Turtle system, which then matches them with projects where their skills are needed.

Green Turtle helps people discover the opportunities available and prepares them to make an impact in the world. By working collaboratively with local communities, Green Turtle helps its users become better travelers and human beings.

Project overview:

Timeline: 12 months

The case study is my thesis project for an MFA Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts. It’s an independent project that I worked on from ideation, design, iteration to prototype.

Thesis advisor: Ari Joseph - Head of Design and Creative Production at BMW Group

Mentor: Jodi Leo, VP Research & Design Nava PBC

Deliverable:

Competitive analysis
Persona
User Journey
Sketch
High-fidelity wireframes
Usability Test

The project started with my interest

I’m passionate about traveling. Instead of checking sights when I’m abroad, I like to pretend to be a local by wandering around without planned activities, seeking ways to experience the culture, people, and stories. To immerse myself in the experience, I seek out activities that make the experience meaningful. An example of that would be a volunteering opportunity in the area of my travel. But, finding such an experience is almost always time-consuming.

Hypothesis

I want to build a platform that helps tourists discover meaningful, volunteer opportunities at the destination of their travel.

Aside from an increase in registration and inquiries about the platform, I will know that I’m on the right track if the users of my platform start to engage in conversations.

Current Market

The way volunteering abroad works nowadays requires a lot of improvements and changes. The main issue is that there are a lot of non-profit organizations that offer volunteer opportunities, but they don’t help travelers who might want to become volunteers to find these opportunities.

Insights from user interviews

I looked at volunteer travelers aged 18 to 35 years old. I had set up a recruiting mechanism through the User Interview platform, created a facilitating guide, and selected five participants to conduct interviews with. After analyzing Affinity Mapping and synthesizing the data, I prioritized the problems based on my goals.

 Hard to find a match
  The volunteer opportunity often lacks duties, information, and the impact people could make.

    Time-Consuming

    People often spend much time researching the opportunity as websites of nonprofits offering volunteering opportunities look unstructured, and it is also hard to identify which ones are legit.

Many travel scam programs  
  To avoid fraudulent programs that are not helping a cause but looking for cheap labor and profit.

Value

Based on the user insight, the new product should be guided by design principles:

Matches users with volunteer opportunities

  
  Simplify the application 
  process

Provide users with different perspectives

Competitive Analysis

Currently, volunteer organizations provide volunteer opportunities that fall short, somewhere between travel and social impact. These organizations don’t have ways for travelers to customize their search for meaningful volunteering experience that matches the work with their skills. This is where Green Turtle comes to the rescue!

Persona

UI Flow

Quotes from User Testing participants

“The skill-matching is helpful. You don’t want to throw someone to inexperience you may not want to be on. It’s essential to match the opportunity and trip you want to go on.
”

— Andrew, Human Resources Analyst

“ On Green Turtle app, I don’t have to skim through a long list, look for one of the countries. These opportunities are very tedious.
”

— Lindsay, Contributing Writer