"We don't just
rebuild furniture,
we rebuild people"
Rebuilding Exchange's Mission
To create a market for reclaimed building materials.
They accomplish this by diverting materials from the
landfills and making them accessible for reuse through
our retail warehouse, promoting sustainable deconstruction
practices, providing education and job training programs,
and creating innovative models for sustainable reuse.
Challenge
The Rebuilding Exchange offers job training for those
in need of 
skills either for self sufficiency or employment.
RX has been struggling to create a ‘community’ aspect
of this program, both in recruiting trainee participants
as well as maintaining volunteers on a long term basis.
Goals
Create online and offline solutions to build the RX community.

Recruit volunteers for the organization, and trainee’s for their
five month job skills training program. 

Streamline the informative and onboarding sections of the
website for the volunteers and trainee's.
​
Help Rebuilding Exchange become a staple part of the community.
Discussing the Brief
We began this sprint with a roundtable discussion about
the brief and came to the conclusion that we had two sets
of users we needed to address. Volunteers & Trainee's.
This then posed more questions...
Who Are Our Users?
After the roundtable we started researching non-profit organizations working with volunteers and job skills training programs. From this comparative analysis we made assumptions about who our users were. We then called Rebuilding Exchange to confirm and realized our assumptions were on the wrong track.
how?
do they find
out about the
programs?
what?
keeps them from joining?
don't they stay
long-term
why?
where?
do they come from
The Trends We Found
Next, we took our research from the interviews and synthesized it into affinity maps for both the volunteer and trainees to find common trends and pain points to inform the creation of our personas. Below are the common trends found.
worried about
job security
wants to do
their part
teach children
about the
environment
make a
difference
wants to be
valued in
community
doesn't want
to be
replaced
Meet Our Personas
01
Assumptions
From our research we began compiling our potential interviewees and questions.
However our direction took
a turn as we questioned our assumed users.
03
Pivot
02
Client Interview
After learning that the direction we were going with our users was incorrect we changed direction of our questions and interviewees.
We then spoke with the Director of Programs at Rebuilding Exchange. During the course of the interview
we came to understand that our
assumed users were inaccurate.
From the trends derived from the affinity maps we were able to make
two personas. 
The personas were used to create understanding and empathy with our end users.
Recent College Grad (22)
Jacob Fields
He is a recent college graduate and
is getting certified in healthcare
insurance. He's unfulfilled in his current
job and want more out of his career.
Libby needs a way to connect with local environmentalists because she wants to be able to give back to her community by improving her neighborhood and city.
Jacob needs to find the best program that will help him change careers successfully to become more self-sufficient, while doing something meaningful and impactful.
Libby Goode
Design Teacher, Mom (35)
Libby grew up in Seattle where she spent
her childhood days playing outside in the rain.
During this time she developed a deep love
of nature. She recently moved her family
to Chicago to teach at the Art Institute.
What Do They Need?
Based on the User Personas, we came up with problem
statements for Libby 
and Jacob that reflect their unmet needs.
How Might We Help Them?
We took our persona's and their problem statements and held ideation sessions with 8 people to see How We Might help them come up with solutions to their pain points.
90%
Have booths at local fairs and gatherings
to recruit for their programs.
80%
Have local community events to give the volunteers and trainees more opportunity to make neighborhood connections and give back.
The Happy Path
We took all of our research and the features that we gathered from
our ideation session and created high level user flows for volunteers and trainees to successfully sign up for their programs.
The lo-fi wireframes below will take us through the volunteers path.
Prototyping and Testing
After testing our first Prototype we came back with a 0% success rate of users signing up for the job skills program or to become a volunteer. We then took that information and completed our 2nd iteration which solved the users problem by 100%
-
Then clicks the Call To Action button to sign up to volunteer.
-
User finds the volunteer
link in the drop down menu
or quick link page.
-
User receives confirmation after submitting form.
-
User fills out pop up form with information.
START
END
Time To Party
To further build the community aspect of the program and become a familiar place in the Chicago neighborhoods we created a Block Party Event as an Offline Solution. It's a family friendly celebration full of music, games, and local food.
