This social good project was introduced to me by a front-end engineer. The Forgotten Adoption Option is a non-profit project initiated by team product owner (PO, Product Owner) Marcy Bursac; the cross-country team collaborates to launch this App service, hoping to help foster parents in the United States reduce the mental effort of exploring the complicated foster care adoption process. 113,000 children are waiting to be adopted and can become potential permanent family members.
We had regular Sprint Retro and Planning sessions for a one-month project with volunteers from various nations, and we had to establish collaboration and accomplish the MVP in a short amount of time.
I got to know the project stakeholders and grasped the team position within a week via the Backlog and Discord channels, structured the design work, created interfaces, presented the experience flow using Figma, and gained project consensus with partners.
The team goal is to launch a minimum viable product before National Adoption Day in the US on November 19, 2022, within six weeks. The design goals are to draw an MVP wireframe, build a Material UI component database based on React to create the interface, and clarify the platform interaction experience with an interactive prototype.
Before launching the project, the product owner had got a lot of experience in interacting with foster parents, so the requirements and functions were established and determined one by one during the development process.
In the US, it usually takes almost two years to adopt a child. This includes the process of preparation, both mentally and physically, getting certified to become a family. Marcy always carries many different foster parent dilemma stories. The advantage of this application is that it has clear steps to guide foster parents who are struggling on government websites.
Before I joined the team, the mobile version was a top focus, mostly in the form of a Drawer that allows users to select various adoption steps. Considering factors such as the computer version having a greater size to show information, the development schedule, and the user operations that are mostly mouse operations, I conducted basic government website research and drew the initial concept, then discussed it with the teams.
The feedback from my partners showed that they liked the way to quickly output the concept to communicate, which could quickly modify the product on the one hand and ensure that the team was developing towards the same goal on the other. During the process, there were different design proposal discussions, and finally, it was resolved to develop in combination with the side menu plus the content block.
As soon as I started designing wireframes, I discovered that the articles on the mobile page content were rich. After team meetings, we tried out different combinations of titles and text. Considered the necessity/readability of each article, the brand identity of Marcy's website/publications, and constructed the readers with a more consistent experience.
The team also opted to use the design of placing Breadcrumbs atop the articles to improve the overall navigation experience.
At the end of several steps, links to the Podcast were added. The team considered displaying it as embedded players connected to a third-party music provider. Nonetheless, given the tight timeframe and the team's limited resources, the episodes are now connected to the platform logo.
The team employed open-source, reasonably style-rich, and mature React UI components to boost development efficiency and maintain a certain degree of design quality, which considerably aided the engineers' development process and the convenience of reusing the components.
MVP was successfully released within a month with the involvement of all team members and received many responses as Marcy worked diligently to generate visibility for the service, reaching about 900 views in a week. We are thrilled that this service has helped to streamline the adoption process for adoptive parents and remove learning hurdles; we feel it will be a life-changing chance for more youngsters.
The most impressive thing to me was a small story shared by a partner - the engineer asked his friend to help test the project platform, and the colleague replied: "Do you know? I am considering understanding the adoption application, and you let me see this platform!" At this moment, the partners' faces were full of surprise. Whenever we heard these stories that made users want to share the platform with others immediately and were full of positive feedback, we felt magically touched. This harvest was much different from other projects.