Calgary Fringe Volunteer Management Software
Anything Goes Theatre
Calgary Fringe is an ‘open access’ theatre festival, bringing together emerging and established artists alike to tell their stories on stage. The company's existing tool for managing their festival volunteers needed to be re-vamped to improve the experience of their users.
The main goal was to improve volunteer and admin experience during the festival by creating a system that was better tailored to their needs.
Collaborated with a team of developers to design and build a digital experience with an up-to-date visual style that carries a feeling of art and festivity.
Project Duration
April 2022 - January 2023
My Role
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Lead the research, ideation, iteration, and presentation of all design work and artifacts through creation of lo-fidelity, hi-fidelity wireframes and prototypes.
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Collaborated with client and project manager to understand the current user capabilities, and industry expectations to identify opportunities for improvement.
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Collaborated with developers to provide a seamless handoff and implementation of designs.
PROBLEM
Calgary Fringe currently uses an existing volunteer management software to engage with their volunteers that is outdated and has a high fall-off rate for their festival volunteers and admins.
CHALLENGE
How might we create a volunteer and admin experience, when interacting with the new software, that fosters better engagement and volunteer management for the festival?
Home page designed for a volunteer desktop view
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Home page designed for a volunteer mobile view
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Shift calendar page designed for a volunteer mobile view
Volunteer shift calendar page designed for a volunteer desktop view
Volunteer sites & Location page designed for an admin mobile view
Volunteer sites & Location page designed for an admin desktop view
SOLUTION
Develop a desktop and mobile application to facilitate a digital experience that was better suited to managing their volunteer and admin needs. With a new and simplified visual style, the site encourages users to stay engaged with their schedule by serving them the important information at the right time.
COMPETITIOR ANALYSIS
Identifying Opportunities
Conducted a competitor analysis on direct and indirect competitors providing user management systems and investigated functions of Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) applications to identify opportunities.
Identified where Calgary Fringe's current platform is performing well and improvement areas when volunteers are picking up shifts and admins managing volunteers.
Key Insights:
✅ Calls To Action
Competitors offered direction to users on what tasks to complete and when.
✅ Information Finding Is Efficient
A repeating theme in the research is the need for information to be readily available with intention behind every click.
✅ Personalized Overview
Users can view the pertinent information displayed immediately after logging in. Current dashboard contains static generic information that may be overlooked.
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Identifying information has been blocked out
Calgary Fringe volunteers at registration booth
DEFINE
Identifying the users & mapping the experience
Utilized jobs-to-be-done framework to split the users into 2 groups, dependent on their job responsibilities.
Lead the creation of empathy maps and experience maps to create a shared understanding of the user needs and identify pain points and opportunity areas.
Key Insights:
USER TYPE
👤 Volunteer User
When claiming a shift: Need ability to find and claim an available shift and request shifts be deleted from their schedule when unavailable.
👤 Volunteer Admin
When creating a shift: Need ability to create and post an available shift.
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When scheduling shifts: Need ability to identify locations that have enough volunteers or are in need of volunteers.
FINDING THE GAPS
Identified Opportunities
Scheduling System
Personalization
Sign-up Integration
System Consolidation
DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY
The design, test, iterate loop
Based on the insight collected so far, we created prototypes, with increasing fidelity and tested each one with the developers and client.
Testing uncovered some issues and challenges in each iteration. Due to time constraints, I implemented the changes in high fidelity to make sure a timely delivery.
Learnings: During the development stage, there were a few feature changes and backlogged items in order to focus on creating pages that are supported by testing and research to make sure the new build would bring real value to Calgary Fringe users.
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FINAL SOLUTION - PROJECT GOALS
Calls to Action
Create more intentional flow through the application by calling out important steps
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Empathy, Empathy, Empathy
Emphasize the needs of the users working through the application
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Efficiency
Create more intentional flow through the application by calling out important steps
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Consistency across Products
The current applications are not designed with Calgary Fringe's design system, so the new experience needs to strike a likeness of the original applications
Our Team
2 Designers
1 Project Manager
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1 Development lead
5 Developers