Discovery

The project began with a focused discovery sprint to reassess the existing CADRE application experience and uncover critical pain points across the applicant journey. We synthesized prior research and conducted qualitative interviews, journey mapping, and empathy mapping to understand not just where users struggled, but why those moments created friction or uncertainty.

Ethnographic Studies

To deepen our understanding, I conducted ethnographic studies through on-the-ground volunteering and observation, allowing me to experience the application and onboarding process within real cultural and environmental contexts. This revealed how applicants navigated ambiguity, expectations, and communication gaps—insights that would not have surfaced through surveys alone.

Ecosystem Mapping

In parallel, I led ecosystem mapping to clarify the broader system surrounding CADRE applicants, including coordinators, mentors, partner organizations, and training resources. This helped identify breakdowns between roles, responsibilities, and information flow that directly impacted applicant confidence and decision-making.

Journey Mapping

Journey mapping revealed key pain points across the CADRE application process, including overwhelming forms, unclear next steps, and anxiety caused by limited status updates. Mapping user actions and emotions exposed where the experience felt fragmented and informed solutions that streamlined the flow, clarified communication, and improved applicant confidence.

Personas and Pain Points

From interview insights and synthesis, we identified recurring pain points and defined key personas representing both applicants and internal stakeholders. These personas grounded design decisions in real behaviors, motivations, and constraints. One of the most critical findings was that applicants frequently felt uncertain about next steps, application status, and role expectations. The application flow demanded high cognitive effort while providing minimal feedback, leading to confusion, drop-off, and diminished trust.

These insights culminated in a clearly articulated problem statement that aligned stakeholders around a shared understanding of the challenge and set a strong foundation for iterative, empathetic design.

Brainstorming Solutions

We facilitated a How Might We (HMW) exercise to reframe key challenges into actionable design opportunities. These HMWs were converted into user stories and solution concepts, helping the team align on priorities and explore scalable, constraint-aware solutions.

Experience Flow

The end-to-end flow was designed to reduce cognitive load and uncertainty by guiding volunteers through a clear, step-by-step application experience. The process begins with an invitation to apply, followed by a structured focus selection and progressive disclosure of experience inputs—allowing applicants to move forward without feeling overwhelmed by long, open-ended forms.

High Fidelity Flow

At the high-fidelity level, the interface prioritized clarity, orientation, and access to resources. Navigation and layout reinforced where users were in the process, what was required next, and how their input contributed to the overall application. Training progress, onboarding materials, and profile management were integrated into the same experience to create continuity from application through activation. By addressing common pain points—unclear status, overwhelming forms, and scattered resources—the final experience made the application easier to follow, reduced cognitive effort, and increased user confidence throughout the journey.

High Fidelity Design

The high-fidelity design translated research insights and validated flows into a polished, production-ready interface that emphasized clarity, ease of use, and continuity across the volunteer journey. The experience was structured into four clear stages—Information, Focus Selection, Application, and Training— so applicants always understood where they were in the process and what to do next.

Visual hierarchy, layout, and content structure were intentionally designed to reduce cognitive load. Information architecture was simplified to help volunteers quickly find relevant details and confidently select a focus area. The application experience broke complex inputs into manageable, step-by-step interactions, allowing volunteers to share their professional and volunteering experience without feeling overwhelmed.

Clear feedback, progress indicators, and confirmation states reinforced trust and reduced uncertainty throughout the flow. Training and onboarding were integrated into the same experience, using a combination of text and video to accommodate different learning styles and support smooth transition from application to active participation.

Overall, the high-fidelity design balanced usability, scalability, and accessibility—ensuring the MVP addressed the most critical pain points while creating a cohesive, supportive experience from first interaction through membership activation.

Reducing Cognitive Load Through Progressive Selection

The original experience relied on a long, form-based layout that required users to scan, interpret, and complete multiple decisions at once—creating high cognitive load and making the application difficult to navigate. To address this, the experience was redesigned to break project selection and skill sharing into focused, sequential steps.

By separating area-of-focus selection from professional experience input, users could concentrate on one decision at a time rather than processing an entire form in a single view. Visual selection tiles replaced dense text fields, making options easier to compare and recognize, while contextual prompts appeared only after a selection was made. This reduced mental effort, minimized errors, and clarified what information was required and why.

Progressive disclosure, inline validation, and clear completion states helped users feel oriented and confident throughout the process. Overall, breaking the experience into manageable steps transformed a complex, overwhelming form into an intuitive flow that supported decision-making, reduced friction, and improved completion rates.