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2021.3 - 2021.4
Uncovering Challenges for RezDawg Rescue
Context
RezDawg is an animal rescue that relocates dogs and cats to animal rescue partners and forever homes in Colorado. It has 326 "active" volunteers on its private Facebook site but still struggles with getting enough participation to manage all the work. Our team of 7 agreed to uncover the challenges that fosters and volunteers of the organization are having and help RezDawg's leader to innovate solutions around those challenges.
Client: RezDawg Rescue
Duration: 4 weeks
My role: UX Researcher
Objectives
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Find out differences between highly involved volunteers and less engaged volunteers
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Help RezDawg better understand the desires and pains of their volunteer community
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Suggest and prioritize innovative ideas
Methodologies
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1:1 interviews
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Affinity diagraming
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Persona
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User journey maps
Impact
The management team recognized deep needs for better communication based on our findings and initiated a conversation with volunteers on Facebook about issues we discovered in our research
Process
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Conduct and analyze interviews
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Map patterns in different personas
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Prioritize problems and solutions
Initial Assumption
RezDawg's leader believed there were two main personas among the volunteers: "rockstars" that always seem to be volunteering and the regular groups.
Interviews
We recruited 14 volunteers and fosters through RezDawg's Facebook group. Since we wanted to find out about the differences between "highly" involved and "less" involved volunteers, we created research questions about their thinking, feeling and activity around their journey with RezDawg.
Interview monitor guide
Initial data analysis
We conducted 2 rounds of initial analysis using a spreadsheet and Miro Board to synthesize what we learned from our interviews.
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The first round of analysis was conducted on an analysis spreadsheet, where we code qualitative data for each interview's journey with RezDawg
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The second round of analysis was conducted on the Miro board, where we summarized each interview and put the most important insights on colour coded stick notes
First-round spreadsheet analysis
Second-round analysis
Analysis for personas
As we analyzed insights from our interviews on the Miro board and organically formed affinity diagraming, three personas came to light: apart from the highly involved "rockstar" Rita and less involved regular type Remy, there's also a third persona Lou, who barely participated in volunteer work.
colour-coded affinity diagraming from the team's Miro board
Map out volunteers' journey
To understand the interaction and expectations of RezDawg volunteers across all channels and points, I led the team to form two journey maps and visualize the most important personas' experiences as a sequence of steps. Then designers put them together and create a complete journey map for Rita and Remy.
Highlights from our findings
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Our hypotheses about the two main personas were correct
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The regular volunteer chose to foster dogs and cats because something had happened in her life that motivated her to stay busy
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For "rockstar", she was able to create a relationship with the founder and that connection motivated her to take on a leadership role
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Only the rockstar group understood how the organization was actually structured.
Prioritise problems
Based on our qualitative analysis, we identified problems that volunteers from the organization face and the points where RezDawg can level up.
How can RezDawg make the organization structure more clear and obvious?
How can Rezdawg facilitate relationship between volunteers and leadership?
Final deliverables
Our final deliverables were the two highly stylized journey maps, two personas, a slide deck report, and an innovation workshop where our team worked with leaders from the organization to help them fully understand our findings and figure out how to improve the volunteer's experiences.
next step
The journey map and persona was designed Ryan Manalastas, Brad Cisar and Jenny Yao
We finished the project on week four after the innovation workshop. The organization found our findings very helpful and already took action following our suggestions.
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