Rapid Prototyping for VolunteerNow

VolunteerNow was an online platform for people to sign up for volunteer programs in their local area.

Came up with the right featureset for the MVP

Developed the roadmap for ongoing feature improvements

Guided the design for the first iteration of the project

Project management to ensure that we met our deadlines on time

Selected rapid prototyping and no-code tools and built the project for quick user testing

On the home page users could start their search for a volunteer programme of their choice. The focus was on volunteers instead of organisations because the plan was to directly reach out to organisations for onboarding and verification.

Each organisation got a dedicated page and was verified by us to be a legitimate organisation. In my customer research, this was important because a lot of people were worried about safety and getting scammed.

Social sign up was critical from a product perspective because it allowed for easy sign ups. It also allowed us to pull data on our volunteers to make sure that they had valid profiles.

We were able to launch very quickly and learned a lot from talking to volunteers and organisations! We found out that while volunteers loved the idea of signing up, the organisations were reluctant to pay for the service.

But because I recommended no-code tools to prototype quickly (it took less than a month to build) we ended up saving a lot of time and effort. And could focus on better ways to monetize the product.