Research Plan for Non-profit at Bentley’s 2019 Hackathon

 

GiveCard, a non-profit startup concerned about providing money access to homeless people through a digital donations platform, needed help from a UX point of view. At the Hackathon, my team chose to create a research plan in order to provide GiveCard with tools so they could understand their users and assess the viability of their program.

 

I worked as UX researcher in a team of 4. I helped in conducting a literature review, designing the research road map and in creating the final report.

Research Plan Presentation
 

Outcomes

The GiveCard team really appreciated the tool we provided for them and made plans to use it in the future.

Our research plan received an award for “Most Actionable Insights”.

 
 
 
 

Users

  • GiveCard volunteers -mostly students with little to no research background- would be using the tool created by us.

  • Users of the GiveCard program would be:

    • People wanting to make donations to people in need.

    • People living in the street or in shelters in need for donations.

 
 

Methodology

  • The hackathon took place over the course of 2 days, in which our team did research on the topic by reading papers and asking questions to an expert in the matter and to the GiveCard team, in order to understand their standing point in terms of the research conducted so far.

  • By the end of the event, we presented our research plan to all attendees.

 
 

Challenges

Getting in-depth knowledge of this topic in such a short time was challenging. We relied on peer-reviewed papers and the help of a sociologist that attended the hackathon event.

 
research map.PNG

We created a research road map to provide GiveCard with guidance in conducting different research methodologies and when to apply them.

journey map guideline.PNG

We provided sample questions to be asked in 3 different stages of a scenario in which a homeless person receives a donation that is deposited into a plastic card, following GiveCard’s concept.

 
 
 
Hackathon

Deliverable

We created a research plan with a roadmap consisting on 6 steps. It also included:

  • Brief domain analysis

  • Sample informational and behavioral questions to understand users’ background

  • Guidance on how to conduct interviews, journey map, empathy map and redesign to come up with a new strategy.