Robogalaxy

Inspiration

Robogals is a volunteer run not-for-profit organisation founded at the University of Melbourne in 2008. The organisation aims to empower and engage young students into STEM fields, specifically with the aim of reducing the gender disparity within the engineering industry. University chapters send volunteers to schools to give workshops on engineering and robotics to students from primary to high school age.

What it does

Robogalaxy is a portal for volunteers across chapters worldwide. Currently, volunteer recruitment and workshop logistics are handled manually by club executives. Robogalaxy aims to significantly reduce the workload of our university volunteers by streamlining the onboarding process and automating workshop logistics.

How we built it

Our prototype was built in Figma using 24 custom components. Our design was centred on the current Robogals branding and sought to enhance it further to create a modern, user friendly website. We began the design process by creating a lo-fidelity prototype with wireframes, and used those as the basis of our final prototype. User convenience was at the forefront of our minds when creating our design. This is to give the volunteer experience the maximum priority because volunteers are the foundation of Robogals - without them we would not be able to achieve our mission.

Challenges we ran into

Designing the onboarding flow was particularly challenging as it is currently a non-linear process. Thought was given to the manual processes and external links involved and we finally decided on an onboarding checklist which covered all the necessary actions. This almost completely removes the overhead of managing volunteer onboarding for club executives whilst still making the process easy to follow and intuitive for new volunteers.

Managing the scope of this project was also particularly difficult. Robogals chapters are managed by university students with little to no funding, and as such there are many manual processes which would benefit from digitisation. Deciding on a product which would best serve the club whilst still maintaining a focused goal was quite difficult. In the end, we decided that the volunteer experience was paramount to the success of Robogals, and so we decided to concentrate our efforts there.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Making 24 custom components with many variants
An interactive prototype which spans all user views
A product design for an organisation which is close to our hearts
A product which we KNOW will have impact, having experienced the problem firsthand

What we learned

Many Figma features including using variables, local styles, component variants and a bunch of keyboard shortcuts!
Although there were lots of ideas thrown around, we learnt that a narrow scope allowed for a more cohesive (and useful) design
X (formerly Twitter) is influenced by Robogals branding