Jeffrey Chan, Ryan Lacey, Amruth Venkatraman

User Classes

Parents Interested In Giving

• Have children that have either grown up or simply grown out of using certain toys
• Do not want the clutter of unused toys in home, but also do not want to create waste by throwing old toys out

Families Interested In Exchange

• Children may be interested in the toys they have, but want others
• Parents may instill values in children to prevent spoiling (ie a little sacrifice on the child's behalf is required for the child to get something they want)

Familites / Organizations Interested In Receiving

• Many low income families may not be able to afford toys they children want
• Day cares and other organizations dealing with children
• Do not have the resources to give 

User Interviews

Middle aged father of college student

PLACEHOLDER

Working mother of five

PLACEHOLDER

Children's day care

PLACEHOLDER

Goals

Targeted Content Delivery

Both the short-term and long-term user expressed concern for the difficulty to find things they were interested in. The most important factor to both of the aforementioned user classes in deciding upon a service opportunity was that the type of activity aligning with their interests. For our short-term user who did not care for doing community service, this was paramount for him to be even slightly excited about helping others. For the long-term user, given the nature of his commitment to the activity, being passionate for the work was a priority as well. Users should be able to identify their interests with the intent that the opportunities they are presented with are ones that they find exciting and worthwhile.

Easy to view database of opportunities

The long-term user remarked that a system in place like that used for the externship program at MIT would be useful to get more information on community service. In the particular example he gave of volunteering at a hospital, since each hospital puts its volunteers in different capacities with different time commitments, it becomes hard to keep track of the opportunities that work well with one’s requirements. This example generalizes to any number of community service events in different fields, where the interested party is looking for a subset of details about the event often not listed elsewhere.

Standardized Event Listings

The service should offer a way for organizations to register events for interested volunteers to view. Considerations for differentiating events include: the category of the event (eg. environmental, homeless, food, education, etc.), time (what period of the day), repeatability (one time event or recurring), and the type of activity. Olga the Organizer raised the issue that often times volunteers are unaware of the types of commitments they are making, which sours their attitude towards the event. Creating well defined events should help the organizations target the volunteers they are interested in and avoid having these problems arise.

Facilitation of Collaboration

Volunteering as a group, especially with friends, makes the service much more enjoyable. This was especially emphasized by the sort-term user and supported by the long-term user upon questioning. The sort-term user expressed an interest in being able to notify friends of which events he was interested in. Additionally, preference would be given to a service opportunity that satisfies the larger group over individual desires if catering to the group would bring in more collaborators.