The Street Team app was designed and developed to help Harvard Square Homeless Shelter (largest volunteer homeless shelter) best serve the local homeless population. The rebranding was prototyped as a proof of concept to better represent the organization through a unified digital presence.
The Street Team app's assets were designed in Sketch and implemented in Xcode with a carefully structured Firebase backend. The rebranding prototype was designed and developed in Sketch, HTML, and CSS. Our team focused on staying true to the organization's existing brand message with a clean new look.
Before touching down in Menlo Park, California, we wanted to be prepared with user research to continue our team's goal of designing and developing for social impact. We chose to work with an existing non-profit organization that serves the Cambridge area of Massachusetts, where two of our team members volunteered. The organization, Harvard Square Homeless Shelter, is the largest student-run homeless shelter and it has a group called Street Team which is formed of students who go out each night to distribute necessities, connect individuals to resources and shelters, and keep notes on long-term individuals who live on the streets of the area. We chose to develop this app based on our members' experiences volunteering with Street Team, and with the collaboration of higher leaders within the organization.
We defined the users of our app as those who volunteer with Street Team regularly, and based our research in qualitative interviews and quantitative background on typical shifts (what is distributed and how that is accounted).
We defined our problem in two parts:
We centered our research and every step in design and development around the following goals:
In designing our backend Firebase framework as well as the user interface of each platform, we focused on asking the right questions, collecting the right data, and presenting it in a visual hierarchy that is most accessible to the final users.
“Street Teamers” can:
The app features five key tasks: searching recorded individuals, viewing recent logs, accessing important notes (default tab), quickly viewing resources, and generating nightly reports.
In an attempt to make our solution more holistic for the organization, I worked on the design side on an additional rebranding concept that would continue from our app to the larger shelter. It was only a preliminary concept, but we wanted something to show proof of a larger concept in our initial deomonstration.
To best illustrate the changes that could be possible, I mocked up a very basic interactive and responsive homepage concept that took the rough organization of their existing homepage but applied our branding concept with emphasis on calls to action.
