About a month ago, I was informed about Helpforcovid.com, a website where Covid-19 projects, dedicated to different problems that arose from the pandemic, were trying to recruit volunteers.

Anything from co-ordinating groceries and help for at-risk populations such as the elderly to co-ordinating supply logistics for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in hospitals were seeking volunteers.

I volunteered for 3 informational projects as a UX Designer, and it taught me many valuable life lessons that I hadn’t been expecting.

Informational problems

When you are ill and you suspect that you might have Covid-19, who do you call?

If you’re like many people, you would likely dial your local emergency number (like 911).

But what happens to people calling 911 for other purposes, like heart attacks or a broken leg?

Without a clear alternative informational source, it’s very easy to overwhelm existing resources, or simply not be heard amidst the rush of information that a pandemic brings.

Your next-door neighbor might need someone to drive them to an outpatient center for dialysis since city shuttles might be canceled, but you might never know that unless that information was presented clearly and effectively.

Those were types of problems I decided to tackle in terms of projects.

Finding my design voice

One thing I found out early on was that compared to others, I had pretty weak creative skills when it comes to designing without restrictions.

One of the things about my career has been that I have mainly worked for large organizations that have Mcdonaldized UX: A lot of my design experience has been about arranging a pattern library of existing design elements into standardized websites that are consistent with the larger suite of tools.

As a result, when it came to being completely creatively open and designing without restrictions, I was a little bit embarrassed by the result.

My best design, free from all restrictions was very similar to what I designed based on design components. I hadn’t flexed my creative muscles in such a broad scope in a very long time, and as a result, my designs paled in comparison to what others had done.

But the thing is, I wasn’t alone. I had the chance to work with designers from around the world, which was how I was able to improve.

I was slowly able to figure out my design voice, largely based on the power of grayscale and simple icons.

Working as a distributed design team

Working in grayscale was a tip that I received from a Polish UX Designer, used to working with distributed design teams.

When most volunteer projects start, there’s no style guide of any sort. No branding colors, no logo, or anything like that. Moreover, it’s not something that one person can decide unless they’re the sole UX designer with full authority.

Not to mention how bad it might look if multiple designers decide to choose contrasting color palettes and fonts.

So by working in grayscale, it could be easily updated when a design team in different time zones made a decision about something.

And by scaling down the visual side of design, I was able to concentrate more on co-ordinating UX.

Learning to document

One of the things about normal work projects is that there is usually some element of stable team members around: people are likely to stick around on a team for months on end, and even if they leave, there’s a gradual phasing out of their work as well as transferring knowledge.

That’s not so much with volunteer projects. The good thing about volunteering is that you can leverage people from all around the world to work on stuff.

The bad? Because it’s not paid and because those people have their own lives, people may suddenly quit, meaning that their work lies in half-finished designs and documents.

Which means that you have to learn from unfinished or unpolished work. Often, there is the thing that the person might have known that you’re just going to have to discover for yourself.

This means that simply the design is often not enough: you also have to document things.

While most designers may be used to annotating their own designs, I took it upon myself to make sure that everyone’s work was well-understood.

I summarized things that lived in Slack conversations and Discord banter into Notion, a wiki where we could co-ordinate and understand why things were designed a certain way.

Even if it was immediately obvious, making a note of it so that it didn’t get lost in case fo disruption was crucial. And I found myself naturally paying attention to the notes and things that were pasted, making sure that they didn’t lose as products started to scale up.

“Scaling up”

While I wasn’t that great in terms of making high-fidelity mockups, at the same time I found that I shined when it came to two words: “Scaling up”.

Strangely enough, across the three volunteer projects I signed up for, these words were always common. It could be used in many different circumstances, but it meant one thing: “Not right now.”

Many times, other UX designers took the role of graphic designers: creating mockups based on what they knew, and perhaps making some changes based on some basic feedback. All the while, developers, database people, and researchers were working on their own thing.

However, I tended to shine when trying to combine the different sides. Because I had both researcher and designer background, I could take existing designs and figure out where they might be running into issues, or where the research needs weren’t quite syncing up with what we were looking for.

Not to mention documenting these types of things for the next generation.

Planning out things with the business, polishing designs to match business goals, and combining with research was an area where I shined, and I even learned of a term that encompassed those things: UX Strategy.

Helping is its reward

There are a lot of things that are on my mind right now. My family members are healthcare workers that are on the front lines, not to mention the uncertainty of my future and aspirations.

But volunteering taught me gratitude. Being grateful for what I have, finding positivity in the world, and coming together to help solve many issues that are plaguing countries worldwide is a reward in itself.

And it’s also helped me grow as a professional. Being able to plan out everything, intersect between the business leads and UX designers and researchers, and learn about problems in-depth has shown me another role that I had fun with, UX Strategy, and allowed me hands-on experience with it.

So if you have time, perhaps volunteer your efforts to save the world. You might just find yourself in the process.