Illustration of the facade of the Bread & Life building in Brooklyn, New York
Overview
St. John’s Bread and Life, a soup kitchen(and more) in Brooklyn, New York, wants to spread the word about their practice at tackling poverty and hunger in the New York City area to other soup kitchen and potential volunteers or donors. Their facility was initially setup to assist people which are facing food insecurity with getting access to healthy meals daily(via soup kitchen) and later expanded to accommodate a food pantry. After listening to the problems faced by the“clients” visiting them, they started offering services to provide information like financial advice, immigration and legal service and even help enlist them in a medicaid program. Their website summarises the complex supply-service system it has grown to be in just over 10 years of its existence.
IBM Research partnered with the Bread & Life staff to help provide them a systematic way to organize this information they wish to share. The project involved discovering an audience, willing to lend a hand in the efforts of B&L and to put such interested individuals in touch with Bread & Life’s staff through this‘Digital experience’. During my internship, I was paired with another UX design intern to build this experience with Bread & Life. While I took the initiative to plan out our steps for research, with help of several employees of IBM research, my handoff were design insights and brainstorm, at which point I helped him out with the designing from our research insights, documentation of the whole process, and some fun illustrations!
What I’ve documented here is the way we designed our deliverable, a storytelling powered campaign website, the challenges we faced and what were some of the interesting insights we came across when designing a website that can help put organizations similar to Bread & Life in touch with people who can help them out in their cause.
Problem Statement
The client’s problem was fairly open ended and required us to scope down the tasks that were presented. The duration of my internship was 12 weeks in total. We planned in a way to leave week 12 for presenting deliverables to the client, publishing the iteration 1 of the solution and(if time permits)collecting data from informal user tests before we document the project and hand over.
Following the IDEO’s design kit on defining a problem statement and improvising it with respect to the stakeholders and their requirements, following was the outcome as the framed problem statement of my internship:
"How might we create an emotional connection about poverty issues to users who are not directly affected by the problem and show personalized steps on how they can contribute with time, money and expertise to its improvement"
Goal
The goal was
To build a digital storytelling experience which explain how Bread & Life made the difference to the lives of those facing food insecurity.
To provide a lead to actionable steps users can take to support Bread & Life
Discovery
Ideal user
An ideal user persona was created based on the desired outcome highlighted by our client, from this website. So in our discovery, we set as ideal user as anyone between the age of 14 - 70, who would be interested in contributing towards the cause supported by Bread & Life and can either :
Volunteer.
Donate.
Connect(partner) with Bread & Life for services.
Simply provide their email address so Bread & Life can reach out to them.
This experience would require users who are interested in philanthropic activities as mentioned above.It is necessary to stress that the experience is NOT designed with the goal to convince anyone into developing such interests. We found that to be a design challenge in itself and out of scope for this project.
Medium of reach.
Our task was essentially to provide information to our ideal user. The medium has to be engaging enough so that we can cover what Bread & Life is, what's their method of elevating poverty, and what can you(as in the users) can do to help them?
We listed various modes of reach, classifying them based on the time window available to provide the information mentioned.
We chose to design a website to provide the information required in an interaction lasting 4-5 minutes on average. And designed to provide basic information in this period while allowing gateways into exploring more information if they wish to.
Insights
Having a design guideline did help me scope out the deliverable, however it was sufficient to set constraints on what to draw insights from. Having worked on a food insecurity related project before, I did have some idea on how organizations like Bread & Life operated, but was not sure how to convey it to others who might be interested in. Apart from speaking to the staff about how they did the research before setting up awareness and donation campaigns, I spoke to some of my friends back home who had been active social workers to learn what were some of the common challenges they faced. Next, for the purpose of research, I explored the existing literature on campaign websites while working to interview some of the potential users and Bread & Life staff with other interns. We also drafted an informal competitive analysis of analogous awareness campaigns that could help us define features for the experience we were designing.
1. Insight from literature research
Before we came up with ideas for possible design, it was necessary that we use Bread & Life’s strengths, their stories and their achievements.
Initial research on why people contribute to any charity, gave these insights:
Credibility is extremely important for a person to contribute to an organization.
Long, Mary & Chiagouris, Larry.(2006) in their paper discuss what is the role of credibility of a non-profit’s website. With passing years, people have grown more prone to not trust the information they obtain through internet. Studies conducted by Fogg et al(2002) in the Stanford-Makovsky Web Credibility Study show that users credibility is shaped by signs like immediate listing physical address and contact details of the organization, seeming well designed or if the website is associated with an organization they trust etc.
Donors or Volunteers connect with those organizations which are working on a cause that they can relate to or is close to them.
Sargeant(1999) created a model of thinking that people go through when deciding whether to donate to a charity. In this cycle, they seek input of information through various sources. This triggers their perceptual reaction to these sources(legitimacy and relatability), and their perception of the charity brand etc, before making the decision about charitable giving. The design of website should thus be relatable and hook our users in a way that creates a bond in similar ways as a visit to Bread & Life would.
Giving is often associated with overall increase in happiness for the donors in many studies
Dunn, Aknin, and Norton(2008) showed a direct relation between giving and happiness. The authors tracked the spending by people who had recently received a bonus and how they spent it. Their studies showed that those who donated a part of their earnings were more happy as compared to others who spent it all on themselves. However, studies like these which drew the link between giving and happiness are subject to social desirability bias from respondents as they might overstate how good they feel after giving to provide a nice image. It is important to consider this when(if at all) talking about any incentives or benefits to donors in the content of the campaigns
2. Insight from interviews
The high level design insights from studies mentioned above and a few other literature gave us a structure for interviewing the Bread & Life staff and potential users. A summary of our learnings from these interviews were:
A. Interview with Bread & Life Staff:
“Donors might not resonate with the problem, as they are not aware of hunger being a burden. It is after they visit do they realize the reality, even in a big city like New York”
“Our job is like a safety net for these people, people don’t mind compromising on food when they have to make choices with money. We want to help them here”
Overview
Problem Statement
Goal
Discovery
Ideal user
Medium of reach.
Insights
1. Insight from literature research
2. Insight from interviews