Here For You
A platform designed to help bridge the gap between individuals and their communities during their time of need.
Year
2024 - 2025
Project type
UI Design
Credits
UX/UI Designer
The Problem
Ever heard of the phrase, "It takes a village to raise a child"? Modern community care sites and crowdfunding sites are all excellent resources for people in times of need; something like MealTrain could get you food delivered when you're busy with newborn childcare, or a universally recognized platform like GoFundMe could help get you the funds for your child's urgent doctor appointments. However, while these are great for aid with unpredictable scenarios or recovering from untimely mishaps, they fail to address the fundamental absence of community support.
The Solution
When these unexpected situations come up, having an existing support circle within your community can make all the difference in the household staying afloat, both financially and emotionally. Accordingly, our goal for this platform was to build just that: a support circle! We wanted to help bring together a centralized community in which an individual would feel safe to ask for assistance. From something as simple as a chore they can't do due to an injury, to being able to kickstart those life-changing fundraisers, Here For You helps connect people directly to their families and communities in their time of need.
Key Features
The Support Schedule
The core innovation of the platform, the support schedule allows users to post any of their daily obligations, chores, and tasks that they might need assistance with. Friends and family within their community can see these postings and volunteer their aid to help lighten the load where they can.
The Giving Page
This is a classic fundraiser style page, refined for more personal needs. Here, you might see parents petitioning for contributions towards childcare, or someone asking for aid in car repair costs. While typically set up for financial contributions, recipients can also ask for item donations and other forms of assistance.
The Process
Ideation and the Design System
The client's main idea was to have a safe and comforting environment with a specific conceptual emphasis on South Indian kolam art, conveying a sense of hospitality and communal kinship. As such, my team and I started brainstorming around warmer, softer color palettes and similar geometric designs.
We settled on concentric circles as an allusion to the kolam ideology, with softer shades of blue and other complementary colors to communicate peace and safety. Using these design elements, we began mocking up some quick low-fidelity flows.
Synthesizing the Design Concepts
During the design process, the client had mentioned having multiple support circle layers, with an "inner" circle of close friends and family and an "outer" circle that represents the broader community. The idea was to have a system where the user could broadcast specific tasks to select groups of people, perhaps with the more intimate or personal activities only being entrusted to the closest of relations.
With this in mind, I returned back to the drawing board to see how I could incorporate the aforementioned concentric circles with the functionality of the platform itself. This was when I arrived at the idea of a solar system, with orbital circles representing the layers of support present within one's community. From there, we built some high-fidelity prototypes to demonstrate our concepts to the client.
The Final Iterations & Future Direction
The final iterations of my team's designs for Here For You, shown below, have provided the foundation for the project and informed it's current design language and features.
I have since left the team to pursue other goals and projects, but in retrospect, I would like to have seen a more structured user research process to better understand the features users would need from this app. The client used their own informal research and personal experiences to guide the direction of the platform, which worked initially, but failed to give my team and I a clear long-term vision.
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