Process

Magical Bridge Foundation (NGO)

UI/UX Design

UX Research

Design Sprint

This is a three-day Hackathon project destined to solve real-life challenges for NGOs in the San Francisco Bay Area. The organization we're helping is Magical Bridge Foundation, whose mission is to ensure people with all ages and abilities enjoy the physical, cognitives, social and emotional benefits of outdoor play and community connections.

Challenges

As magical bridge foundation doesn’t oversee all events that’s held in their playgrounds (especially events held by the city or at the nearby parks), it’s very challenging for them to manage events, communicate with outside organizations and collect data for future fund raising.

Solution

We designed an all-in-one management portal for manage events and volunteers. With a one-time setup, the system will auto-scrape events information from city websites and social media platforms, which significantly unloads most of the manual work and inefficient cross-organization communications.

Challenges

Solution

Challenges

Solution

Problem discovery

To understand the problem spectrum, we needed to listen to our users — the Magical Bridge management team and the playground visitors.

On the 1st day, we conducted three runs of interviews with their founder, CMO and volunteer managers to better understand their values and challenges. We dug deep into their day-to-day operation challenges, listened to their needs and expectations for the solution.

We also got the chance to visit the Magical Bridge playground at Sunnyvale on day 2. It was a great opportunity to get the first hand experience about the playground. We also interviewed ~10 people at the playground about their experience, from parents living nearby to 5 year-old kid.

Define the problem

With our research data in hand, it’s time to synthesize and come up with a opportunity space. We ran a few design workshops to understand the true pain points of our MG team. And synced up with the MG team for feedback to make sure we're on the right track.

How might we…

After communicating with the Magical Bridge team, we narrowed down our problems-to-solve statement into the following areas that can be solved in a strict 2 days time-frame:

How might we build an all-in-one management dashboard for the Magical Bridge management team to help them view and manage volunteer and events information more easily?
How might we auto-scrape all current and future events across different platforms and websites and display them into MG foundation dashboard so they can save a lot of manual works?

Quick Prototype & Get feedbacks

Before jumping into the high-fid design and waste a lot of time building the real solution, we want to get feedback from the concept to make sure we are on the right track with minimum man power.

Bringing the solution

After a few runs of prototyping, collecting feedbacks and adjusting design. We were finally ready for the high-fid prototypes. With the time constraint, we decided to focus on the two main features — events management and volunteer management. We hope we can continue iterate the product in the near future.

“Our time with you really opened our eyes to the many possibilities for the future of Magical Bridge. Thank you so much for your creativity, insight, and your commitment to this effort. ”

Kris Loew

Magical Bridge Foundation

Conclusion

This three-day event has challenged me on a whole new level — researching and designing a digital solution within an extremely short timeframe. Once again, I am impressed by the effectiveness of user-centered design workshops, which improved our communication and problem-solving efficiency.

I am grateful to have met and worked with my talented and supportive teammates: Ruotong Wang, Danie Zhang, Linda Li, Liyu, and Ellen W. We cannot achieve any of this without each of them.

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