Wellspring Family Services
Helping families in crisis access, save, and organize the resources they need.
Duration
Summer 2022
Activities
UX Research, UX Design, Visual Design
Role
Visual Design Intern, Blink UX
Team
Corey Hage, Cathy Bahn, Andrew Lenzini, Ethan Pidgeon, Tyler Caro, Alex Gherman, Tosin Ojulari
Background
Wellspring Family Services is a Seattle-based nonprofit that aims to prevent family homelessness and guide families in need back to stability. As part of Blink UX’s pro-bono program, our team helped envision a mobile-first resource triage tool to help these families find, access, and save the needed resources.
Project goals
Understand the information-gathering needs of families seeking service.
Identify opportunities to better serve those needs.
Get feedback on concepts in order to drive vision.
Extend the Wellspring brand to a mobile experience.
Create an MDE and strategic roadmap for achieving the vision for the project.
Provide an inspirational future vision for donors, leadership, and investors.
1
The Problem
The search for support can be a long and arduous process. For families experiencing financial and/or emotional hardship, navigating the seemingly endless programs, forms, and applications that exist both online and on paper is especially difficult. Once they do find what they need, finding and organizing these resources efficiently and intuitively becomes a problem.
“The current system makes it very difficult for individuals to find the help they need or know who to turn to in times of crisis. It's overwhelming to encounter many wrong doors before finding someone to help. Unfortunately, some individuals never find the help they need.”
Wellspring Stakeholder
2
The Process
Each and every decision we made on this project was informed by thorough research, largely thanks to the hard work of my team. We conducted stakeholder interviews, foundational user interviews, design audits, strategy workshops, and user testing. Some of our key research goals were to:
Understand Wellspring’s current process of providing help to clients.
Uncover areas of friction in resource discovery and usage within the current system.
Understand the needs and feelings of families in crisis.
Assess the social services landscape and identify opportunities for improvement.
Understanding the people and the problem
In the first phase of our research, we conducted in-depth remote user interviews with individuals who had experiences of housing instability or homelessness to help us understand their stories, behaviors, and pain points. We also interviewed Wellspring stakeholders to learn more about their process and goals. On the design side, we conducted both competitive and inspirational audits to get a sense of common UX patterns, visual design inspiration, and opportunities for improvement.
“I was discouraged in the beginning ... I didn't have a lot of hope in these resources, but I knew I needed to do something. I needed to do the footwork ... but there wasn't the push or the encouragement.”
Participant 5
Competitive and inspirational audits helped me understand the social services landscape and identify visual design opportunities.
An internal Wellspring visual design audit helped me understand the current brand identity to best translate it to the mobile experience.
Broad exploration and rapid iteration
From a design standpoint, we began by sketching on paper and rapidly iterating ideas and feature concepts. On the UX side, we developed user stories and flows and defined the general information architecture of the tool. From there, we moved into lo-fi wireframes, which we tested with potential users and slowly refined into hi-fi wireframes and then a functional prototype.
Putting it to the test
Using refined lo-fi wireframes, we built prototypes of main flows to be tested with Wellspring clients and potential users. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive; however, we discovered some important opportunities for improvement. For example, select icons were unfamiliar to some users, indicating that we needed to add contextual text labels. Overcoming these visual design and accessibility challenges was a large part of my job.
I would definitely be able to find resources that accommodate what I’m looking for. I think it’s a great website. It’s going to help a lot of people, and it’ll definitely help ease the stress when they’re trying to find resources.”
Participant 1
3
The Solution
The tool we developed aims to revolutionize the way users discover, save, organize, and access resources. It empowers families in or approaching crises to regain control of their situation and get back on their feet faster.
A better way to find the right resources
Many individuals and families struggle to find resources that fit their needs, timelines, and eligibility requirements.
We designed a quick and easy needs assessment, allowing users to pre-filter resources based on their situation. This greatly reduces the cognitive load required to begin the search process.
A modular, personalized home screen experience
Different users have different processes and preferences. Some may not know where to start, and others may know exactly what they want. Some may be open to providing personal information via the needs assessment; others may not.
We designed a modular home screen experience that is flexible and adaptable. At every step of their journey, we personalize the experience to help users quickly find what they need.
An more intuitive way to search and filter
Searching for resources can be difficult, if not impossible, for users who don’t know precisely what they’re looking for.
We designed a dynamic search feature, allowing users to search and filter using keywords by location, eligibility requirements, category, and service offering. For returning users, the tool will make suggestions based on recent searches.
Save and organize resources, your way
We spoke to many users who collected resources over time, each with a different method of organization. As they accumulate links and information, tracking it all or knowing what to do with it can be difficult.
Gone are the days of notes full of random links, clogged desktops, and wasted time — users can save and organize their resources as they search, helping them easily keep everything under control.
Share with yourself and others
Once users have saved organized resources that might be helpful, they may need help figuring out what to do next. We found that most like to share resources with Wellspring case managers or family members; many even email things to themselves to return to later.
Users can share or export individual resources or resource collections in any way they see fit. This saves time and energy and serves as a bridge between exte’ external preferences and processes and the in-app experience. Again, personalization is the key.
4
Handoff
After concept testing, we spent a lot of time refining high-fidelity wireframes, perfecting our user flows, and prototyping key interactions. We also documented the visual design system and provided resources to help the Wellspring team carry this project on to the next phase.
Putting it all together
The main deliverable for this project was a high-fidelity prototype that would help Wellspring secure funding and support as they move on to the development stage of this initiative. In addition, we created a basic style guide and design documentation to help them continue to build on our system.
5
Outcome & Impact
I am proud of the work we did on this project. This is an important and difficult problem requiring particular attention to detail and sensitivity, and the team handled it with empathy and grace. Our approach was evidence-driven every step of the way, and our proposed solution has real potential. Hearing from real potential users that this tool would help them find the support they need was extremely rewarding.
