Empathy in action: an app for volunteers

The Phoenix mobile app is a project very close to my heart. I created it at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to help a local voluntary organisation in the town where I live.

Phoenix is a youth voluntary organisation founded in 2018 to support the local fire command in the Kostinbrod municipality. Its members are amazing young people who help in the hardest times: fires, natural disasters, floods, landslides and rescue operations. When they are not in the field, they help people in need across the municipality.

There are many small, hard-to-reach villages in the area, where mostly elderly people live. The volunteers deliver food and medicines, help with physical work in gardens and yards, and when they have time, they stay for a cup of coffee or tea.

01 · Empathise Research the needs of volunteers and the project coordinator.

02 · Define State the users' needs and problems.

03 · Ideate Challenge assumptions and create ideas.

04 · Prototype Wireframes and designs.

05 · Test Try the solutions out.

At the beginning of the pandemic, the need for voluntary work grew enormously in a very short time. The organisation posted on social media that they needed help with organising missions and recruiting volunteers.

Their project coordinator was doing all of this by himself, using Excel tables, emails and a lot of phone calls.

I replied to their post and found like-minded people ready to help. Two young programmers from the local high school also responded. We contacted each other and offered to build a platform for recruiting volunteers and registering missions. We met the project coordinator and started brainstorming the requirements right away. There was no time to waste: dozens of people in need were calling the organisation.

Designing for people requires a human-centered approach, and this is where design thinking works best. It is a non-linear, iterative process that helps teams understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create solutions to prototype and test.

To present the process to our stakeholders, I used the NN/g Design Thinking 101 visualisation.

Design Thinking 101, © Nielsen Norman Group (nngroup.com)

A collaborative persona

I used a persona template designed for input from several team members at once. Working together brings more perspectives into the persona.

The collaborative persona we created together in Mural.

A mobile app for Android and iOS that helps volunteers quickly find and sign up for missions:

• Browse Active, Upcoming and Past missions
• Sign up for a mission directly from the phone
• See if a mission is still recruiting volunteers, to avoid overbooking

Wireframes: welcome, registration, home, missions, mission details and profile.

Final designs for the same flow.

One of my biggest learnings from this project was that design thinking works even without a formal team structure behind it. We came together through a social media post at the start of the pandemic — two high school programmers, a project coordinator managing everything by phone and Excel, and me — with no time to waste, since people in need were already calling. A non-linear process and a persona template built for input from several people at once gave everyone a fast, common way to contribute despite very different experience levels.

This reinforced that empathy is a practical tool, not just a mindset. Understanding what the project coordinator was actually struggling with — recruiting and tracking volunteers manually under sudden demand — is what shaped the three core features: browsing missions, signing up directly, and seeing if a mission still needed volunteers.

A small, ad hoc team built a real app for a real and urgent community need — the same process that works for enterprise products, scaled down just as well.