Turning college students’ passion for social causes into action by making volunteering easier to discover, coordinate, and experience together.
Project Overview
Derived from “ayuda” the Spanish word for “help”, Yuda is a mobile app that reduces the friction between discovering and participating in volunteer opportunities by making coordination, connection, and access seamless for college students.
As part of IN4MATX 132: Advanced Topics in HCI, I was tasked to collaborate on a conceptual project focused on a shared topic of interest: environmental and community engagement. During this project, I helped conduct and synthesize research as well as the transition from low-fidelity concepts to the final design of key flows to explore how digital platforms can reduce barriers to civic engagement.
Duration
Role
Lead Researcher
UI Designer
Mar 2025 - Jun 2025
Tools & Skills
Figma, FigJam, User research, User testing, Visual design, Prototyping
The Crew
Team Leads: Charlotte Huang, Catie Xun
Webmasters: Sherry Tram, Elise Alinsug
Participation Advocates: Evelyn Jiang, Jennellee Samkhem
Lead Researcher: Lana Wang
Scribe: Raquel Peña
THE PROBLEM
We found that students weren’t struggling with motivation, they were struggling with participation due to logistical barriers and lack of discoverability.
Students with busy schedules and unreliable transportation often struggle to find and participate in volunteer opportunities. Events are often scattered across platforms and frequently lack essential details. As a result, even interested students didn’t act.
Problem Statement
How might we encourage college students in Orange County to engage in current environmental, social, and political community issues through volunteering?
THE SOLUTION
A centralized platform for students to easily discover, coordinate, and participate in local causes.
The biggest drop-off wasn’t awareness. It was the moment between “this looks interesting” and “I can actually go.” Yuda bridges this gap by helping students discover opportunities, receive news information about local causes, and connect with peers who care about the same causes, reducing the barriers that often prevents students from turning interest into action.
Discover Opportunities
Coordinate With Peers
Track Events
RESEARCH
Despite high concern for social issues, volunteer participation among young adults is declining, dropping from 22.8% to 15.9% nationwide.
Sources: Do Something Strategic , The Guardian , Double the Donation
91%
Of students care about climate change
80%
Expect their institutions to take action
60%
Of students say they want to be more involved
This gap between intent and action became our main challenge to address.
Understanding where participation breaks down and why students struggle to get involved.
Competitive Analysis
We analyzed 9 volunteering platforms to identify gaps in event discovery, information access, and community features
User Interviews
We conducted 9 interviews with UCI students with volunteer experience to understand their motivations and barriers
Volunteering opportunities were somewhat visible, but context and community were often missing.
While some platforms allowed students to browse volunteer opportunities, discovering the right event and understanding what it involved was often difficult. Search tools were limited, event details were unclear, and opportunities to connect with other volunteers or stay informed about causes were rare.
What we learned from speaking with students
Students seek opportunities that align with their personal values, professional growth, and the chance to connect with like-minded peers.
Unclear event details create friction
Vague event descriptions, transportation challenges, and limited news about local issues prevent students from converting interest into attendance.
Personal fulfillment motivates students
Students rely on social media and student organizations to discover events, and manually track events they attend using tools like Google Sheets or Excel. High cognitive load creates a barrier to consistent participation.
Fragmented discovery & manual tracking
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“Usually [organizations] don’t post how many hours are going to be needed…sometimes when I find really good volunteering [opportunities] that were still posted it’s already passed the deadline and it’s already ongoing.”
“Ride issues are greatly impacting the possibility of me attending events …Public transport isn’t reliable enough to get to farther volunteer events.”
“I want to, I see it, I know this is happening. But I don’t know in what ways I can support these groups.”
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IDEATION
Synthesizing research into design solutions
From our research, key barriers emerged: students struggled to find reliable opportunities, connect with peers, and event logistics were unclear. To address these, we defined 3 principles:
Make action visible, immediate, and accessible
Reduce logistical uncertainty and ambiguity
Make volunteering social, not solitary
Guided by these principles, we began brainstorming solutions and exploring potential ideas for our product to address these barriers students face.
Exploring how a user would discover & participate in opportunities through storyboarding
I created a storyboard mapping how users would:
Discover and filter for volunteer events on the home feed
Sign up for an event and view logistic details
View recommended events
Determining key features & task flows
Our research revealed that students needed a simpler way to access opportunities, coordinate logistics, and stay connected with peers.
To support these needs, we mapped key user flows for:
Discovering and signing up for events
Connecting with other users
Coordinating rides
Creating the information architecture
After mapping the core user flows, we defined the structure of our platform to better support these interactions. Our information architecture organized the experience into 5 primary areas: home, search, news, messages, and user profiles.
DESIGNING A SOLUTION
Translating ideas into early design solutions: news, messaging, search & sign-up, profiles, & rideshare.
As a team, we defined 5 core areas students needed to take action more easily: discovering volunteer opportunities, staying informed through a news hub, managing events through a calendar, connecting with peers, and coordinating rides.
Using the task flows, we began translating our ideas into low- and mid-fidelity designs. Each team member explored concepts for different parts of the system to quickly test potential solutions.
My task: design the profile experience for users and organizations.
The goal of the profile pages was to help students track and manage their events, connect with peers, and follow organizations they care about. To design an interface that felt familiar to students, I analyzed common patterns used in social media platforms and explored several layout options for organizing events, connection, and activity and shared them with our team for feedback.
Several Low / Mid fidelity screens based on each of our proposed features
Where my initial design fell short
My initial concept used a scrollable overlay to display event details, but early feedback revealed several usability issues:
There is no breathing room
Users had to scroll excessively to look for events
Calendar wasn’t easily accessible
Before: Initial lo-fi profile designs
Designing a clearer, more scannable profile to use as the foundation for high-fidelity
I redesigned the page to improve clarity and navigation by introducing:
Clearer visual hierarchy
Tabbed sections to view events
Volunteer interest chips
A more accessible calendar entry point
High-fidelity profile & organization pages: adding clearer trust signals
I received feedback from the team to have clearer indication of trust signals for drivers, adding review ratings and an additional chip indicating verified drivers when translating the mid-fidelity frames into high-fidelity.
Updated high-fidelity Profile pages
Key features we designed as a team
News
Search for news articles tied to relevant causes, events, and related resources
Messages
Keep in touch with other volunteers and drivers to coordinate rides
Profile
View and manage events, peer connections, and organizations in one place
After: Refined mid-fidelity profile designs
Search
Find events, users, and organizations by keyword, cause, location, date, or time
Calendar
Track RSVPs, access event details, and share events and your calendar with friends
EVALUATING OUR SOLUTION
We conducted a heuristic evaluation of our designs to catch potential issues before user testing.
3 major issues emerged with our app’s design, though time constraints prevented us from implementing all changes immediately, these insights guided the design of our high-fidelity prototypes later in the process.
Limited cancellation options for ride requests, event & calendar sharing, event sign ups
Inconsistent undo & back buttons
Lack of Error Prevention
New users are left without clear support when navigating the app for the first time.
Weak Recovery & Feedback
Canceling requests, editing calendar events, and returning to pages lacked clear recovery.
No Help & Documentation
Preventing input errors during onboarding
I introduced a Continue button with a disabled state that activates once the user selects an option to prevent incomplete inputs and guide users.
Streamlining event sign-up to reduce errors
Replaced the multi-step sign-up flow with a single scrollable form reducing friction and making the process easier to complete. A disabled button state was added to prevent submissions until all required inputs were completed.
Improved user control over ride requests
I added an option to undo a ride request and a direct path to view pending requests, giving students clearer control and an easier way to track their status.
TESTING OUR SOLUTION
We conducted 9 think-aloud usability testing sessions with UCI students across 8 core tasks that reflected real-world scenarios.
Usability testing showed that participants navigated pages smoothly, validating the overall structure of my design. At this stage, I helped synthesize feedback across other features to ensure the overall app experience felt consistent, especially where usability issues surfaced in other flows. Participants responded positively to most core features, describing them as convenient, intuitive, and visually engaging, though a few navigation issues were identified in specific flows.
Design challenge: designing under time constraints = delegation.
Once user testing was completed, the final deadline for our project was approaching, but several features still needed additional refinement for smoother interactions, visual consistency, and clearer task flows. To ensure our final prototype felt cohesive, I took the lead in refining the calendar, rideshare, and messaging features based on participant feedback and aligned the app experience with the patterns we defined as a team.
Key insights: navigating through several features was confusing for a few participants
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Problem: inconsistent interactions made the user experience confusing
Filters behaved inconsistently across Search and News pages, navigating through multiple screens rather than interacting with the filters directly.
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Solution: simplifying interactions to match familiar experiences
I replaced the pop-up with a bottom sheet to create a more intuitive filtering experience and simplified the search flow so users can explore causes with just a single tap.
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Problem: navigating initially required some assistance
Navigating key features felt overwhelming without some assistance for first time users
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Solution: tutorial during onboarding & help button
Added an onboarding tutorial and help page which can be accessed through a question mark icon to help users navigate through the app with ease.
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Problem: users struggled to navigate the calendar
Users struggled finding and navigating through the calendar and had difficulty sharing events.
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Solution: making the calendar more user-friendly
I redesigned the calendar experience to be more familiar and intuitive, letting users view and share events without leaving the page
Our Final Prototype & How to use Yuda
Easily discover volunteering opportunities.
Explore organizations, people, and opportunities that align with your passions, whether it's environmental action, education, or community building.
Don’t have a ride? No problem!
Request a ride from other volunteers, review driver details, and track their pending requests, all in one place.
Track & share events with friends.
Track past and upcoming events through your profile and share them with friends to stay connected and organized.
Stay connected with peers & organizations.
Stay informed about your community by connecting with peers and organizations to stay updated on their activity, events, and volunteer opportunities.
Try out the prototype for yourself!
Over the course of 10 weeks, our team designed a platform that helps students easily discover volunteering opportunities and make friends, turning volunteering into a fun and rewarding experience.
Our final prototype brings together several core features based on our research findings. I'm extremely proud to have contributed to this project and delivering a cohesive, user-centered product within 10 weeks!
KEY TAKEAWAYS!
What I learned.
Seeing the process from start to finish over 10 weeks was incredibly rewarding. Working with a large team for the first time felt intimidating at first, but it pushed me to grow outside of my comfort zone.
Within these 10 weeks, I learned how to prioritize key interactions, embrace feedback, iterate quickly, and support design decisions across the project. Going through the full cycle of the Double Diamond process, prototyping, testing, and refinement gave me a deeper appreciation for user-centered design and its impact..
It’s Okay to Ask for Feedback!
Asking for feedback felt intimidating at first, but embracing it early made my designs stronger and helped me move faster, especially under tight time constraints!
Prioritization > Perfection!
I learned how to prioritize core interactions, iterate quickly, and make decisions based on user needs rather than sweating the small details.
Teamwork Matters!
Working with 9 teammates pushed me to communicate through weekly syncs, align quickly, and help members learn Figma to keep our project cohesive!
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Keeping Our Designs Cohesive and Consistent: With multiple designers contributing to multiple complex features, we had to align on patterns and components early.
Balancing Complexity of Our Features: Designing many features while keeping the experience simple required frequent iteration and simplification. We had to rethink and redesign and fix prototypes across multiple screens, focus on the most important interactions, and lean into familiar patterns so students wouldn’t feel overwhelmed.
Figma Learning Curve: I supported teammates who were newer to Figma by guiding them through prototyping tips, creating templates, and shared components to streamline our workflow.
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I gained hands-on experience with user-centered design through contextual interviews, creating context scenarios and storyboards, performing cognitive walkthroughs, and iterating on prototypes through usability testing to deliver an initiative, student-focused app.
We approached our project using the Double Diamond process. Our team initially diverged and explored possibilities and pain points through research, then converging and narrowing our focus to define our problem and come up with a definitive solution.
Iterating based on user and team feedback became central to our approach. Each refinement brought us closer to creating an intuitive and user-friendly final product.
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With more time I would…:
Conduct additional usability testing sessions with more students from different majors, schedules, and tech comfort levels to uncover edge cases and further refine flows.
Enhance accessibility and personalization, making the app more inclusive and tailored to user preferences, such as notifications for new events based on user interests.
Explore more social features to make volunteering more engaging and encourage participation, such as interest-based volunteer circles.