Helping Hands

Making a difference can be daunting, and it’s easy for one to get overwhelmed and feel that they’re not making a difference in whatever cause or causes they believe in.​

During this creative jam, our team looked at finding a way to bring people, small businesses, and non-profits together by building communities around causes they care about.

Problem

One challenge we face in our communities is supporting those who are facing homelessness and helping them get connected with the proper resources and help that they may need.

Solution

The app, “Helping Hands”, looks to tackle the overarching challenge by empowering people to work together and build communities around causes they care about. It allows for individuals, NGOs, and businesses to serve the communities with their own strengths — whether it be through time, money, or goods/services, etc.

Research

To better understand the some of the challenges some homeless people face in our communities face, our team dove into researching the homeless demographics and some of their daily needs.

When doing our research, a few questions came up:

• What steps can we take at the individual level to address the unsheltered homeless population?

• Why are they unsheltered?

• What assistance do they need?

Here was some of the initial research we did based on those questions.

Summary of Research

Some of the research that we found based off our questions:

Why are they unsheltered?

• Lack of affordable housing

• Lack of homeless assistance resources for shelter (or permanent housing)

• Various choice/barriers to assistance - shelters have policies that sometimes don’t allow access for couples, pets, those facing challenges (ie. substance use or mental health)

What assistance do they need?

• Network of public restrooms and showers across the city with staff that keeps it consistently cleaned that is opened 24/hours

• Outreach teams need to be equipped with necessity products (ie. socks, masks, hand sanitizer, backpacks, clothing, coats)

• Expand access to low barrier medical and mental health care

• Network of 24/hour warming centers with proper air filtration, ventilation and safety protocols

Design Iterations

Based off of our research, we created web flows that walked through a potential user's experience and lo-fi designs to help address consumer needs through our app

Mock-Ups and Walkthrough

Creating prototypes based off of final design iterations and creating deliverables.

Click here to view the final prototype on Adobe XD.

Next Steps

To continue to do user research, testing, and further iteration on the app so that we can continue to uplift the community around us. This will include expanding the business side of app so that different organizations can come in as users/supporters of Helping Hands. We will also expand on more inclusive and accessible features (ie. language support, text to speech in search, etc.).

Our Team

• Karen Wong: UX Design, UX Research, Lo-Fi Wireframes

• Aditya Patel: UX Design, UX Research, Visual Design, Interactive Design

• Grace Lee: UX Research, Lo-Fi Wireframes

• Tosha Brown: Ideation

• Emily DeLorge: Ideation