The platform connects professional volunteers with educational institutions — a daily meeting place where mentors and teachers share their experience with students. After several years live, the team wanted to redesign the experience for the people who used it most: frequent volunteers.
We were brought in to lead the Product experience process: understand the current solution, listen to power users, map the friction, and translate it into a clear set of strategic actionables, wireframes and a new information architecture the product team could build from.
The platform had built a strong base of professional volunteers. People believed in the mission — sharing their experience with students — but the experience itself was becoming friction-heavy. Discovery of new opportunities was hard. Communication with educators was inconsistent. Frequent users had no real way to feel recognized for their commitment.
The product team knew where the pain was, but the redesign needed clarity: where to start, what to prioritize, and how to design for the people already doing the work week after week.
Our role was to lead the product process from understanding through ideation — starting with the kickoff and ending with a complete information architecture the product team could build from.
Kickoff session and stakeholder immersion to align on objectives, users and the current state of the platform.
Benchmarking and concept work around search, categories and a content-first home experience.
Survey with the existing community plus in-depth user sessions with frequent volunteers to surface real motivations and friction.
Translating insights into actionables, low-fi wireframes and a clear information architecture for the product team to build from.
We started with a kickoff session to align on the essentials: objectives, actionables, who the users are, and the approach we'd take into research. We resolved key open questions about the current solution and the platform's existing volunteer experience.
Objectives. What do we want to achieve with the redesign?
Actionables. What concrete next steps come out of this phase?
Users. Who are the volunteers we're designing for?
Research approach. How will we learn from them in a way the team can act on?
Kickoff board — objectives, starting point, professionals and research questions.
Stakeholder session — mapping pain points and edge cases of the current solution.
Before talking to users, we explored two early concept directions for how volunteers would find what matters to them on the platform. These weren't final designs — they were thinking tools to test assumptions against real behavior in the next phase.
Concept A — Categories & search engine. A content-first home where category structure and a strong search engine carry the discovery experience.
Concept B — Facilitated search. A guided experience with chips indicating specific categories, surfacing relevant filters earlier in the flow.
We benchmarked patterns from existing platforms with similar discovery challenges — reference points that helped us think about content density, filter affordances and how to introduce categories without overwhelming new users.
References for a content-first home with category structure.
References for chip-based filters and facilitated search.
We ran a survey across the existing professional community to understand how they had originally found the platform, what kept them engaged, and what they wished worked better. The responses gave us quantitative weight for the qualitative themes we'd find in interviews.
We then ran in-depth sessions with frequent volunteers — the power users who had logged the most sessions and contributed the most hours. We built a research script to keep sessions consistent and let us compare across people.
Survey responses analyzed by source of discovery, motivation and friction.
User session 1 — a frequent volunteer sharing their weekly rhythm.
“When I talk to one director repeatedly or one educator repeatedly, I have a clear deliverable to add value for them”
Hours of interview audio and survey responses were synthesized into a small number of themes — the recurring pressure points and motivators that would shape every actionable that followed.
Frequent volunteers consistently said the experience — speaking with students, sharing stories from their career and academic life — is what brings them back. Connecting with other volunteers doing the same is also valuable, but secondary to the act.
Connection issues, microphones not working, students not engaging, and difficulty finding the session entry link (“Had a hard time finding where to click the Zoom link”) are small frustrations that compound across weeks.
Volunteers want richer information up front: teacher experience, school location, number of students, and the educator behind the request. Many opportunities are incomplete, forcing external research to decide whether to commit.
Power users want to connect with teachers and directors before sessions to align on what they'll prepare — but rarely get responses today. The repeat relationships are where the clearest value gets delivered.
Volunteers don't know what their session videos are for, whether they can share them, or what action to take. The asset exists; the narrative around it doesn't.
Existing rewards don't move the needle. What would? Connecting with other volunteers to grow a network, and seeing real progress — volunteers referenced Duolingo as an example of communication done well.
Insights only matter when they become decisions. We translated the themes into six prioritized actionables — each one with a clear product implication and a place in the redesign roadmap.
When presenting a volunteer with their session videos, accompany them with actionable insights and a clear purpose — ideas of what the recording is for and how to use it.
Make post-session feedback essential. Let volunteers know how they can improve, both on approach and content, and store this feedback so it builds over time.
Allow professionals to sign up to give the same session on multiple occasions — acknowledging that frequent volunteers often want to repeat what's working.
Provide a guide describing who makes the most impactful and reliable volunteer, and how to invite them — significantly improving the recruitment process for both sides.
Open a direct channel for communication and interaction with teachers and educational institutions — where the repeat-relationship value actually compounds.
Let users save commonly used filters and frequent searches — so the volunteers who return every week don't redo the same setup work each time.
Other guidelines for the redesign
Across every actionable runs one principle: accompany the user through their whole journey. After a session, keep them engaged. Encourage the next sign-up. Emphasize the impact of their volunteer work. Make feedback after the session mandatory. The platform shouldn't be passive infrastructure — it should be a present companion.
The wireframes reflect what we heard. Once a volunteer is using the platform, the home moves up the volunteer opportunities, removing the large header image. Above the opportunities we surface three high-priority content blocks: profile completeness, gamification of impact, and upcoming sessions. Below, recommendations are personalized to what the user is most likely to enjoy. Click any wireframe to see it larger.
Ideation wireframes — early exploration of the new home for frequent volunteers.
The final deliverable was a full information architecture covering six top-level areas: Home, Find volunteer opportunities, Community, Invite a friend / Account / Chat / Notifications, Profile and My events / sessions / favorites / achievements — each with its flow mapped to a screen state.
Complete flow map — six top-level areas, each with its full flow.
Learning
The project reinforced a principle I keep coming back to: user research is most valuable when it informs strategic decisions, not just interface improvements. Many of the frustrations volunteers described were not caused by individual screens, but by gaps in structure, navigation and information architecture. Once those foundations became visible, design decisions became significantly clearer. The redesign was successful not because we improved screens, but because we gained enough confidence to rethink the foundations behind them.