Samaritan
Employment system for homeless people. Samaritan encourages them to get a job and connect to employers. Our ultimate goal is to change the perception towards homeless people and involve them into our society.
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Role
UX Researcher, UX/UI Designer,
Project Overview
Samaritan is a mobile application which supports homeless people in finding employment, aimed towards those who hold their own smartphones. The project involves deep research into a problem space and builds a solution through quality design.
Role
UX/UI Designer
Key points of this project💡
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Community: Developing a community involves creating supportive environments that address our unique challenges and provide opportunities for growth, stability, and connection. However, there are always has 'issue' for 'the better community'. What is the issue? Homeless people. Then, what is the better community? A combined group with no outsider.
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Homeless people: As it currently stands people usually view homeless people as being some elderly man with a substance abuse issue, but that is simply not true. There is no typical homeless person, and while they are currently in financial hardship, doesn’t mean that they are lazy. A majority of people are simply victims of circumstance and deserve a chance for help through the community.
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Smartphone: People would be surprised about the fact that most of the homeless people have a smartphone. So, smartphone could be the answer to involve them into the community.
The Research
Our goal was to understand users, their needs, behaviours, and preferences to inform the design and development process. I started from the question "What is a better community?" Communities have constantly been trying to develop a better society when it comes to homelessness. Homeless people are our community and my team decided to make the employment platform specifically for them.
The employment of the homeless is a constant social issue. Homeless people are not easily employed and are excluded from many communities, which could be a lose-lose situation. Homed people may think that homeless people are too lazy to work. However, the problem is not that they do not work, but that they cannot work. So why do homeless people experience hardship getting jobs? First, there is no employment platform for the homeless, which is actually used by the homeless. Secondly, many employers also do not look at the career of homeless people who have no experience.
Our competitors 👀
We searched Android and Apple stores to find applications for the homeless. There were very few applications on the market and no employment-related applications. Although direct employment applications cannot be compared, we would like to look at applications or websites for the homeless and explain how our approach differs. The apps we compared with were WeShelter and OurCalling. The two are successful examples of homeless applications that encourage people's participation, donations, and supplies and provide them to the homeless.
WeShelter
WeShelter is also a great help in helping the homeless relieve their anxiety by providing shelter.
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OurCalling
OurCalling encourages people to volunteer and donate through applications, helping more than 7,000 homeless people every year.
Here we can see how these two applications and our access to them are different.
✅ They both have
Helping the homeless and making a better society because of people's service, donations, and participation.
❌ They both don't have
Active participation of homeless people (the involvement of employees or informants). Therefore, our approach is to encourage homeless people's voluntary participation. Finding and obtaining information using this application, communicating with employers on the platform, and updating their profiles to attract employers' attention, and getting interview opportunities are all things that should be done with the active participation of the homeless. So we can learn from these successful applications how they got people's participation and how they provided information to the homeless. We also try to explore how these points can be applied to our applications to induce the homeless and their employers' participation to create an active platform.
The Design Process
Persona
🧑🦰👨🏻👩🦰👱🏻♂️👱🏽♀️
This user persona is for a better understanding of our target user. It is fictional representation of the user based on research and data analysis. We set a fictional user named Steven Castro and analysed his background, hobbies and skills. It was a great experience that we actually had a time to think about our target user and what they would look like.
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Storyboard
📚✍️
This storyboard is a visual representation of a user's journey or experience with our platform. It consists of a series of illustrated that depict key moments, interactions, and emotions throughout the user's interaction. This helped out team communicate and understand the user's perspective, identify pain points, and visualise potential improvements in the user experience.
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Low/High Fidelity Prototype
The Solutions
University of Sydney researcher Justine said:
"Mobile phones help people survive and stay safe in heightened risk situations. Mobile phones also play a critical role in helping people move out of homelessness and gain financial stability."
We have thought about how the mobile phones that homeless people use as a lifeline can be used to find work.
Firstly, we researched how many homeless people have cell phones. According to the University of Sydney research, 95% of homeless people own a phone of some kind and 77% own a smartphone.
50% of homeless people use their cell phones as a way to find work. However, homeless people were only using the Internet to search the overall job market. We could not find any mobile applications on the market that specialised in homeless employment. It means the lack of digitak employment options make it chalenging for homeless people to find employment information and find a job.
So, we decided to make an employment app for homeless people.
Three Project Aims
Through the application, homeless people can get information about the job market and communicate with prospective employers. We should expect to increase the employment rate of homeless people so that they have the opportunity to make money and ultimately reduce the proportion of homeless people.
We combat stigma surfing homelessness. Changing people's perception of the homeless providing people with an opportunity to learn to understand and trust homeless people.
Through this project, it can provide employers with a reason as to why they should hire homeless people. There are several reasons why homeless people should be employed as well as giving back to the local community, building positive partnerships with local shelters and community centres, and increasing productivity.
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Second
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Results
After the research, our proposed system was a mobile application for users with smartphones that supports homeless individuals, and those at risk of becoming homeless, to access employment opportunities and support.
The following concepts being considered were as follows:
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Jobs are posted by employers, and users apply
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A social platform for employers and jobseekers to communicate and build networks
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A feedback and rating system for users to share information and experiences about employers
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Employment help: Resume, skill development, education
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Support