Be Open
“Needs more color.” — Howard,Open Oakland Project Lead
Open Oakland is comprised of local volunteers dedicated to leveraging their skills and technology to innovate civic engagement. The majority of its participants are white males from technical background.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
“Show us, don’t tell us.” — Potential Volunteer
One the surface the Open Oakland experience does not reflect the organization’s core values nor demonstrate their commitment to diversity. A quick scan of their website, social media, active members, leaders, and stakeholders revel a rather homogenous group. This suggest a disconnect between the makeup of the membership and the community it serves. Another barrier is that the website doesn’t make it easy to get informed and involved, driving to vague on-boarding experience that caters to those already familiar with tech.
As such, OpenOakland is having difficulty attracting and retaining new skills and diverse participants from those very communities and cultures it aims to benefit.
HYPOTHESIS
“The plumber has a leaky faucet.” — Open Oakland Vet
With all the good OpenOakland is doing developing vital product and tools to increase civic engagement, there doesn’t seem to be much attention paid to creating awareness, educating new participants and engagement.
SOLUTION
“Reach the people where they are & speak their language.” & “Leverage our existing assets”
- J. Moore, Product Manager
Get native POC from Oakland to participate
Attract people from non tech backgrounds
Leveraging the website, organization and properties to attract talent that best reflects a commitment to our mission and values.
Use existing digital platforms to do a better job at welcoming new members.
Address low hanging fruit by improving UX on openoakland.com, with a redesigned IA, creative and copy approach.
Create a promotional marketing on social media to drive adoption and get user to the site.
Leverage existing public and private partnership, relationships and connections to create programs to train there base in the fields that they need more support from
APPROACH
“Dive right in”
We joined hack nights, conducted interviews, and synthesized our data
ROLES
UX Researcher
IA
Product Designer
METHODS
Contextual Observations
Interviews
Heuristic Evaluation
Features
Site Mapping
Wireframes
Usability
Usability Testing
Prototyping
TOOLS
Pen and Paper
White Board
Figma
—
DURATION
2 weeks
RESULTS
Better taxonomy
Simplified Navigation
Implemented ways to browse, sort and filter
Streamlined the buy flow
DISCOVERY
Interview, Inquiries and Surveys
Right away we kicked off discovery with:
Interviews, Inquiries and Surveys with two key groups of people.
POTENTIAL VOLUNTEER SEGMENTS
2 x UX designers with varying experience volunteering
1 x UX designer with little to no volunteer experience
UX researcher and Product Manager with no experience but interested and wants more info
“ Are you Interested in using tech to help the community?” - J.Moore
EXISTING VOLUNTEER SEGMENTS
20 X attendees during the Zoom call
1 x Open Oakland Project Manager
1 x long time volunteer and lead engineer
DISCOVERY:
Contextual Observations and Inquiries
We based our research on observations made by attending a weekly hack night.
Ahead of the hack night we conducted heuristic evaluations and usability testing, conducted with potential volunteers that matched our target.
Those findings helped shape the hypotheses and the assumptions we sought to validate in our testing
DISCOVERY: Diversity Inquiry
“Where my peoples?”
Diversity of Attendees
Towards the end of the Zoom call I took an informal survey by asking the participants on the call 3 questions:
How many identify as “Black’ and/or of African descent ?
How many grew up in Oakland? Or how many people identified as female?
None of the 20 plus people answered yes to the first two questions and only 1 person outwardly identified as female.
Diversity of Skills
There were non technical roles present during the one project tested for Diversity.
2 Project Managers,
1 analyst,
Open Oakland had a business goal of 6-8 non technical roles on this particular project , reference on the Project Status Doc shared via drive as part of the “Open Oakland” orientation.
DISCOVERY: Site Audit, Heuristic Evaluation and Usability Testing
The goal was simple, join a hack night
Potential Volunteers were asked to explore and sign up for hack night on the OpenOakland.com while providing feedback.
We followed up with questions designed to reveal sentiments around their on boarding experience and the impression given of the level of diversity and inclusion, based on their visit to the homepage.
“It doesn’t give me anything specific that I’m going to be volunteering for. I’d like to know what it entails right away before signing up.”
—
”How long will it take? How are we going to improve the city?”
—
”I feel like it’s very ambiguous and I don’t know what I’m going to be doing.”
DESIGN PROCESS
We focused on 3 main areas:
01
Better UX
Update the IA and revise the creative to highlight important information and make it easy to find
02
Brand Awareness
Develop a social media campaign to capture target audience
03
Partnerships & Programs
Offer a mentorship program through project leads to engage and elevate skill sets while supporting onboarding
And developed a 4-pronged design strategy:
DESIGN PROCESS: Initial Sketches & Responding to Feedback
We started by featuring the most critical information up front on the homepage, with both information about Open Oakland and opportunities to get involved. Throughout the site we wanted to use more imagery and add sorting and filtering features for users to make their experience relevant to them.
We moved into testing and wireframes, while responding to feedback:
highlighting our mentorship program on the homepage
showing project impact
clearly showing events open to volunteers on the events calendar
adding an events detail page
adding the functionality to create an account for users
Visual Imagery
Poor image quality with little connection to the brand or content
⇩
Graphic images to support the brand and values and empathy for the user
Copy & Blocking
Text-heavy content with no CTAs
⇩
Clear CTAs, button style, and multiple opt-ins
Page Layout
2 column text-heavy layout
⇩
Visual blocks and modules
CREATIVE CAMPAIGN
I Am Open
We built a campaign to make the Open Oakland’s events more relatable and accessible. It stems off the idea that community members are valued assets and a vital part of civic engagement. The tagline is there to announce our community outreach and mentorship program, designed to facilitate participation from the local community as well as to ensure that each member will walk away from completed projects with valuable, transferable skills.
Promo Banner & Campaign Landing Page
Visually we went from a 2-column text-heavy layout to communicating our key messages through visual blocks and modules.
Social
We launched a social media campaign called “I’m Open” to drive overall brand awareness, informing non-techies that there’s way to get involved and be supported while doing so. We developed and announced a mentorship program to help people develop transferable technical and non technical skills
By making it easier for people to get involved, we remove barriers between Open Oakland and the community it serves.
LEARNINGS
Keep it real.
The real issue is that Open Oakland needs to strengthen its ties to the community it serves.
Moving forward we’ll conduct a thorough analysis of the business in hopes of establishing partnerships that can do more to support community outreach efforts.
