BEMORE: A UX Concept Study On Community Involvement and Change
Community based applications are a very narrow market. Not only because volunteering is a somewhat underfunded vein, but also because the same organizations that have outdated and cluttered web pages would never invest or think about having a mobile application.
Until now.
Some time ago, while taking a part time UX bootcamp, I played around with the idea of creating a mobile application that allowed community members a way to interact and stay up to date with local service events and volunteering. While the course helped me develop the idea and research the topic throughly, the build out, not the concept, was lacking.
BEMORE is an idea that I want to continue to shape out, and grow until at some point in the future, services and non profits in Baltimore city will pick it up and use it as a resource to help communities stand together and act in the name of social change and responsibility.
The function of BEMORE is a simple one. A list of events based on your area, a blog keeping members and non members up to date on the general happening in the city, and a user page where individuals that have already signed up for the service can see recurring events as well as continue to search for new ones.
My overall process went something like this. Understand, research, lots and lots of research, drafting user interview questions, conduct interviews, sketching and ideation, and then some light usability testing.
The working mockup for the mobile application looks something like this.
The most interesting part of designing something like BEMORE is that there is no comparative analysis to look through.
While sites like VolunteerMatch and EventBrite take the front seat in event planning and have a strong hand in the non profit sector, that’s not all those competitors are focusing on.
Therein lies the swift brilliance behind BEMORE. It’s the first of its kind not only because of the pitch, wanting a community service app that doesn’t require a log in, that doesn’t require users to commit to the same events and organizations. But simply because it enables users to have a seamless interaction with a search that would otherwise turn up hundreds of results, most of which would not end in that user joining the community event or taking part in something like a clothing drive or helping out at a soup kitchen.
Most of the time, when thinking about social change on a larger scope, there’s a huge number of barriers and blocks in the way.
I’m not saying that BEMORE would not require a lot of partnership within the community and its non profits because at it’s core, it would not be able to function within those leaders and their resources.
The point is that being able to design for social change, building out a project that would be used for nothing but good, that allows a partnership between the tech community and the non profit community, that’s something that is worth putting time into.
It’s worth drawing and redrawing. It’s worth testing and then redesign and then more testing.
At the end of the day, UX, to me, means the ability to connect good design, and good people, with an even greater good. It means having the ability to change the way that communities interact with one another, and the way that they interact with tech and digital spaces of any kind.
Because after all, User Experience is designing for the world and the people that live and work and give back in that world. And BEMORE embodies that through and through.
