Design that earns trust,
and gets adopted.

The retention problem

Home delivery was the program's hardest-working channel and its leakiest. People signed up with good intentions, completed one delivery run, and never came back. Nobody knew exactly why. Recruiting harder would not fix a broken experience, so I treated retention as a journey problem, not a headcount problem, and went straight to the volunteers themselves.

Helping Hands sat at a B2C and B2B intersection: at-risk neighbors receiving food, home-delivery volunteers, partner organizations, and internal ops. My first move was not a single study, but a research portfolio. I listed every plausible research project in a spreadsheet and scored each on business impact, user-experience impact, resources, and time, then focused on the highest-impact, lowest-waste work. For the volunteer retention study I wrote a full research plan: discussion guide, screeners, process outline, and participant criteria. It was the first formal research plan the org had run.

Role and constraints

• Role Lead UX Researcher · part-time designer
• Timeline Jul – Dec 2021
• Scope Volunteer journey, onboarding, retention
• Methods IDIs · remote usability · service blueprints · affinity · 5 Whys
• Constraint No prior research baseline; lean nonprofit resources

I worked directly with stakeholders from a founding team with Google and Lyft product DNA, which meant high expectations for rigor and a real appetite for journey-level thinking, including problems that lived off the screen.

How the research ran

Finding the right people was half the work. Some segments were narrow, especially home-delivery volunteers. I recruited through Facebook groups and Reddit, then ran a second filter most screeners miss: a short pre-interview call before any session was booked. That kept the sample honest when the segment was scarce.

Remote usability tests on volunteer sign-up. Analytics showed more than half of volunteers arrived on mobile, so every onboarding test ran on both desktop and mobile. I focused on two segments pulled from prior volunteer data, namely people aged 18–25 and people 55+, because those cohorts represented different device habits, physical constraints, and expectations. Sessions were exploratory rather than timed: the goal was conceptual models and failure points, not stopwatch optimization.

Semi-structured interviews, recorded with consent. With no research partner in the room, I recorded Zoom sessions so I could stay present in the conversation and take structured notes from the footage afterward. Because there was no prior research corpus, the guide stayed semi-structured on purpose, tight enough to answer the core questions, loose enough to chase surprising turns. Each interview walked the full arc from “I wonder what volunteering here is about?” to the quiet moment after the last drop-off.

Service design beyond the UI. Drawing on UCLA Extension service-design training, I mapped front-stage and back-stage work in service blueprints across journey stages: consent and rights flows, information checks, handoffs ops owned that volunteers never saw. Several of the retention leaks only showed up once the blueprint made those handoffs visible.

Read a text description of the service blueprint

The visible blueprint segment maps a sequence of consent updates. A volunteer enters Your Rights consent, then Disclosure consent, then Authorization consent. They acknowledge and continue through the first two steps; authorization also requires a signature, bot check, and submission. The submission sends user information for review, exposing operational handoffs that are not visible in the volunteer interface.

What volunteers told us

Synthesis used highlighter coding on transcripts, affinity clustering to connect patterns, and 5 Whys on the sharpest issues to separate symptoms from root causes. Six friction themes held across the journey:

1. Flexibility comes first. Busy people needed control over when they volunteered, where they delivered, and how many boxes they took on. “There's just certain neighborhoods that I'm not comfortable delivering to alone.”

2. Know before you commit. Volunteers walked in blind to what the job actually required. “I don't recall being warned about how heavy the boxes are.”

3. The job needs tools. Heavy boxes, stairs, towing anxiety, and language barriers made shifts physically and mentally harder than they had to be, especially for volunteers over 55.

4. Volunteering felt lonely. “I think the biggest thing missing is a sense of camaraderie. It's great knowing it's not just you and that you're part of a group.”

5. There was no ending. Shifts ended with silence instead of closure or impact.

It was just kind of like you finish and then you drive away. No reporting back. Thought it was a bit odd, it did feel off. I was just like, oh, what should I do?

6. Routing broke trust. “The first time when I put in the link it didn't even show me the stops. And so I'm like, I'm not going to bother with this.”

Read a text description of the volunteer-quote board

The board synthesizes the theme that volunteers want ways to connect with one another. A participant says that the biggest missing element is camaraderie and that it is meaningful to feel part of a group. The highlighted insight recommends ways for volunteers to build more connections, while another note calls for feedback that shows they are part of a community and that their work helped others.

Recommendations and how insight traveled

The 18 recommendations mapped each theme to a fix the product and ops teams could act on:

Availability schedules visible to partner organizations; box counts volunteers choose themselves (3 to 10, with time warnings); a four-step explainer carousel and wiki that answer most questions before commitment; dolly-and-partner prompts at sign-up; shared community spaces for volunteers; a “done” checkout that triggers impact stories and recipient thanks; and just-in-time routing with the stop order curated in advance.

Deliverables were built for mixed audiences: POV statements, a future-state volunteer flow, service blueprints, and weekly readouts that mixed video clips, audio, and verbatim quotes so stakeholders heard volunteers in their own voice, a habit that comes straight from my film background. Early, frequent sharing kept founders and ops aligned while the study was still running, not only at the final readout.

The strongest signal in the data was the one the program had never designed for: volunteers stay when they can feel the impact of their work.

When people directly thank you, that makes everything worth it. It gave me the sense of THIS IS WHY.

What I would carry forward

Prioritize the portfolio, not just the study. Scoring possible projects on impact versus cost kept a lean nonprofit focused on the leak that mattered most.

Recruit like the segment is rare, because it is. Community channels plus a live pre-screen beat a polished screener alone when participants are specific and unpaid.

Retention is a service, not a screen. Blueprints and off-the-screen handoffs explained churn that UI-only testing would have missed, especially the missing ending after the last drop-off.