As a local resident to Bradford Moor Park, I was familiar with the tasks that work volunteers do. This time, I walked the length of the park, keeping an eye out for any problems that arose; could I handle them on my own? What needs to be reported?

A fallen tree that was obstructing a path had been cut down and cleared. Was this something that had previously been reported? While walking to the pond, two team members were moving some fly tipping. Many used the Whatsapp group to post images, while another person would share the details to local park maintenance team. This led to waiting times, duplication of work and no updates on whether it had been handed off.

I had an informal chat with a Lead of Friends of Bradford Moor Park. Here are some of the questions I asked:

1. What does the day-to-day look like for a park volunteer?
2. What tasks do the volunteers carry out?
3. What is the process for reporting an issue like?
4. What are the current frustrations?

Following the ‘5 whys’, I discovered the purpose of the work, he cited ‘local residents see the condition of the park, believe the council won’t help and so go on to not report the issue. We want to change those perceptions and improve the park’ he explained ‘the current way used to report issues to the right council service is a barrier to improving the park’.

As a result, if problems were difficult to report, people were less likely to report them, resulting in a service not tackling the problem.

The goal for the Friends of Bradford Moor Park group was an improved park, which can be achieved by the help of users actively reporting the issues to the right services. If users don’t use the service the park is less likely to be improved. Inevitably, a demand on a service opens the door to additional funding.

At this point, I was tempted to flip through the pages of “This is service design doing,” but after some thought, I decided that it was more important to present parts of the service solution another day and focus on task completion.

Instead, I quickly created a stakeholder map to visualise the experience, relationships and influences.

It was time to see if the research could provide any insights into potential solutions.

From my volunteer work and the interview, I had a good idea of the interruptions, roadblocks, annoyances, and inefficiencies that the journey entailed. 

I wanted to make recording park issues easier so that the tasks could be completed quickly. I sat down and wrote down the tasks (blue) and their goals (green) and arranged them so that they could be seen as a series of user flows. 

This was useful since it helped me visualise the screens I needed for the hand drawn wireframing exercise the next day.

I took some time in the morning on day 4 to research what UX patterns might be used;  social feed, tasks, posts and timelines.

On the last day of the sprint, I reached out to Yasar, one of the managers of Friends of  Bradford Moor Park, and also asked my mentor for feedback on the functionality and clarity of my prototype. Overall, the feedback was very positive. A few UI changes came about:

The map was smaller in size, and as volunteers entered the park from various locations, they found the map to be more useful in visualising where they are in relation to open tasks. The map has been enlarged to make it easier to read.

Originally, a manager’s contact information was in the “report” workflow, but volunteers preferred it to be centralised on the home screen. Contact has been moved inside the hamburger menu.

It took a few seconds for the original heading “tasks” to acknowledge that it was a volunteer task. It was changed to “our tasks” so that anyone in the group could associate themselves with any task.