On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Since then, millions of Ukrainians have been displaced from their homes, in what is described as the ‘Greatest Humanitarian Crisis in Europe since World War II.’ This is the story of “The Hope Project” — an app aiming to equip overwhelmed shelters with essential resources, grounded by a robust peer-to-peer network.
As air raid alerts rip throughout the country, shelters in Ukraine have been overcrowded with Ukrainians seeking safety. Many shelters haven’t been utilized for five decades, so sudden influxes of inhabitants have resulted in inadequate supplies of vital resources like food, water, and medicine. Those staying in shelters are hungry, cold, and scared.
Our goal for this project was to supply shelters with sufficient basic resources while mobilizing volunteers in the community.
We asked: How might we help people who are staying in shelters, which are overcrowded and have food/utility shortages, while fostering a peer-to-peer aid community?
We knew Ukraine has been facing many challenges, but we wanted to narrow our scope to ensure our solution would be targeted and effective. To better understand common struggles caused by the war, we started off by surveying 21 Ukrainians from the age ranges of 10 to 75+ in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Zhytomyr.
The most common themes we discovered were relocation and essential supply shortages:
Now that we had a clearer direction for what to focus on, we conducted more targeted research. This included a follow-up survey with 9 Ukrainians aged between 10 and 75+ who had to relocate from their home to a shelter. Our goal was to gain in-depth insight on the challenges of this relocation and how they tie in with limited supplies of essential needs.
The key insights we discovered were although people thought shelters felt safer compared to being at home, they commonly faced 2 struggles: hunger and coldness.
With defined objectives in mind, we began to move into the ideation phase. Our team conducted an ideation whiteboard session, organizing our thoughts by common frustrations and goals.
From there, we narrowed down our ideas by discussing every solutions’ feasibility, how well it was addressing users’ needs and frustrations, and how we could implement the feature into our final solution. We understood the solution had to equip shelters with necessary supplies while giving volunteers the opportunity to help without risking their safety. Ultimately, we landed on an approach that would create a robust volunteer collaboration system, where donations would be delivered to shelters based on need and location.
After we completed our user flow, we drew low-fidelity wireframes, focusing on creating a simple interface.
When developing our high-fidelity wireframes, we evaluated how users would feel when using the app. Looking back on our surveys, many respondents reported feeling anxiety when relocating. With that in mind, we chose calming pastel colors with straight-to-the-point features.
This project emphasized the importance of truly empathizing with the users. I have the privilege of not experiencing the effects of the war firsthand, but by communicating directly with potential users themselves, I was able to gain a strong understanding of their goals and pains, and ensure our solution would properly address them.
Due to time constraints, we were not able to conduct comprehensive interviews or usability testing. However, if we had more time, we would have liked to interview our survey participants in-depth to better understand specific needs and struggles in shelters. We would also have conducted 2 rounds of usability tests to receive feedback on the app’s function, navigation, and visual design.