Evelyn Mukherjee

Grassroots Grocery is a grassroots volunteer organization with the goal of providing nutritious food for their neighbors in need, with a strong emphasis on community connections. They offer four categories of volunteering, including joining their Saturday produce distribution events (“Produce Party”), group volunteering, volunteering your talent, and filling local Grassroots Grocery-affiliated community fridges. 

Going into this project, our clients at Grassroots Grocery wanted to understand:

• How easy is it for users to sign up for volunteering on the site
• Is the organization’s message and values properly communicated through the site?

The work surrounding this project aimed to increase engagement with the site and increase volunteer sign-ups by improving the user’s experience and connection to the non-profit organization. 
With Grassroots Grocery’s business goals in mind, 8 moderated user tests were conducted on two different target audiences. Each team member was responsible for hosting 2 moderated user tests.

Methodology

Tools Used

Zoom: A meeting platform that makes it easy to host remote meetings. This tool was specifically used for hosting moderated user tests.

Figma: An online graphic design tool. In this case, Figma was used to create product mock-ups.

This project began with an initial client meeting to understand what the client wanted out of this analysis. From there, the team came together to define the scope of the project, target audiences, and a user test protocol for moderated user testing.

User Testing and Participants

The usability test was performed using a formative moderated user test method. The formative moderated user test is beneficial for gathering qualitative insights  including perceptions and behaviors for newly launched web pages, and allowing the moderator to ask the participant questions in real time to gain a deeper understanding of their thought process. The tests were performed virtually, consisting of one participant and one moderator and typically took around 25-35 minutes to complete. Each test consisted of three sections: the pre-test questions, the user tasks, and the post-test questions. 

The user tasks consisted of six user tasks and six questions. The test aimed to garner honest feedback on the site’s ability to convey their values and missions, the visibility of the different volunteer opportunities, and the process of signing up to volunteer. Each task was geared towards using a different feature on the website, allowing the user to evaluate the site’s navigation and overall functionality. We compiled feedback from each user test to analyze and develop recommendations for the website. 

In order to get a wide range of feedback, we targeted three different user groups:

Target Audience 1: People who are interested in volunteering but have not yet volunteered.

Target Audience 2: Active volunteers who are looking for new volunteer opportunities and have not heard of Grassroots Grocery.

Target Audience 3: Active Grassroots Grocery volunteers who have had limited contact with the website. 

With our testing protocol set and participants in mind, the next step was to recruit participants for the user test. To do this, we reached out to the Pratt community and other interested parties with a screening questionnaire so we could pick the best candidates that fit into our target audience groups. 

Results

Through the analysis of our user tests, we developed a few recommendations for Grassroots Grocery that would help to boost engagement on their site, increase volunteer sign-ups, and bring their organization values to the forefront:

1. Volunteer opportunities should be listed on one page, in order for potential volunteers to be aware of everything they can do at a glance 
2. The “Fill a Fridge” section should include a map that shows all of the fridges available and their current status in terms of contents. 
3. The “Fill a Fridge”, group volunteering, and “Produce Party” volunteering opportunities should be better explained, including a description of how the events work, typical time and location, as well as what the volunteer should expect/know if deciding to volunteer for an event. 
4. All of the people involved in the organization should be on one page, with descriptions of how each group interacts with one another.
5. A single landing page for all of the volunteer types should be added, with one master sign-up form available to all of them. This form would be short (one-page), and should give the user feedback when submitted. 

A more in-depth explanation of each recommendation and product mock-ups can be found in the following report: