Foster the City

An 8-year vision brought to life in 3 months.

V0: Nov 2022 - Apr 2023
V1.0: May 2023 - Aug 2023 

Role: Design Sprint Facilitator, Product Designer, Project Manager, Product Manager

Wonder & Wander Team
Foster the City: Philip, Kylie, Darren

Challenge

Foster the City is a ministry that partners with churches to make fostering more sustainable long term. Since they began operating in 2015, they've expanded to 223 partner churches and have placed 500+ foster children in loving homes.

As they expanded, however, it became more difficult to maintain momentum and execute across each church in a consistent way. Every church is a different size with varying levels of commitment and interest.

Since 2015, the founders have dreamed of creating an app that could smooth out the process, but advisors had told them it would take millions. Our team (Wonder & Wander) offered to create an MVP in 6 months for less than a fifth of that price. We began in October 2022 and we finished in April 2023. We designed and developed an app that became the central hub of communication between all users—foster parents, support friends, advocates, and Foster the City staff.

Approach

Our approach to their problem was to define and design the app around the aha moment, which we believed was the key to longterm success of the ministry. The app highlights requests of the foster family front and center, while also maintaining personal human relationships by showing the profile icon of each support friend. The experience rallies the team together and reinforces the relationships they have together. 

Since each role has different needs and responsibilities, we designed a different side of the app for them to use.

Visibility was also one of the key focuses of our design. Not just visibility for it's own sake, but visibility unto building trust and accountability. We created a way for both Foster the City staff and advocates to be able to monitor the status of other users in the app.

Result

We shipped the MVP to Testflight in 3 months with a pilot test group which led to XX increase in requests made and requests fulfilled and positive reviews averaging 4.5/5 compared to their previous experience without the app.

Afterward, we started phase 2 of the project to focus on the advocate role and onramping. Unfortunately, after completing that scope of work, Wonder & Wander shut down and handed off the project to another development team. Foster the City brought me onto their internal team and I became the bridge in the handoff and final stage of the app until launching V1.0.

My Impact

01

I drove on research, understanding the background of the project, and leading the design sprint and brainstorming sessions.

02

Shipped full end-to-end flow within a short period, collaborating with cross-functional partners across all stages, from research, design, to execution.

03

Stepped up into product manager and project manager when a team member left in the middle of the project. This stretched my product thinking and understanding of what a product team needs to work.

Sprint Kickoff

User Interviews
Project Goal, HMWs
Lightning Demos
Mapping
Solution Sketching

We kicked off the project with a design sprint with the Foster the City team. I planned and facilitated the workshops for 2 days, 5 hours each.

We narrowed down our focus to this primary question below.

How might we ensure strong trust & accountability?

Key Findings &
Our Personas

1. The real AHA is when Foster Parents ask for help and receive it. This leads to the ultimate goal of long-term fostering. 

2. Every FTC ministry looks different at each church depending on its size, advocate leadership style, and number of people in the ministry. 

3. Foster Parents are allowed to make 8 requests per month, but they don't often max that out because they feel guilty asking for help. 

4. Often times, people will function in two roles at once: an advocate might also be a foster parent, or a foster parent will also be a support friend. 

We ended with votes on our solution sketches and collectively decided that the first phase of the project would be focused on making and fulfilling requests.

Deciding on the
MVP (V0)

Since every need is different for each persona and all of them work together to make FTC what it is, the app was going to need 3 sides to it. 

We ended with votes on our solution sketches and collectively decided that the first phase of the project would be focused on making and fulfilling requests.

Going Hi-Fidelity

I went straight to creating high-fidelity designs, wanting to get feedback as quick as possible from the client. I focused on the core part of the flow: the foster parent making requests.

Later on, I realized this was a mistake because it resulted in more debt and confusion. I should have refined the flows and wireframes to lock that in first after we had sorted the features by priority.

Here are some of the design decisions I made.

Stepping Back: Can we Change the UI Colors? 

2 weeks later, our client wanted to change the UI colors to be a more direct reflection of their brand. They wanted to stay away from any pastels that looked more "feminine."

I audited their brand materials and created a new UI color palette. I reviewed this with their internal creative director and brand designer.  

Feb, 2022
Pilot Testing with 3 Active Churches

Testing with real users! 🙀

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Learning here was to start with plain wireframes first to mitigate the debt created later on. This ended up causing us to have miscommunication and confusion on what the most recent design was that needed to be developed.

How might we blah blah blah

How might we blah blah blah

Feb 2, 2022
Mini Design Sprint for Onboarding and Defining what Advocates need

I led a Crawl, Walk, Run session with the client to get the ball rolling to brainstorm the needs of advocates.

Later on, Darren gave us his own deep dive on what the onramp needed to look like for Foster Parents and Support Friends, and what the advocate needed.

[show the new part of the map we were going to focus on (same image from beginning)

[deciding P1s and P2s]

Onramping per
Persona

I created flows and then wireframes of specific jobs-to-be-done on Miro. Using tools to make it faster: We wanted to find ways to work faster and not have to reinvent the wheel. Intercom checklist was a new feature they just released so we tried that out since it was so close to my design. 

[show the new part of the map we were going to focus on (same image from beginning)

[deciding P1s and P2s]

Advocate Flows & Wireframes

I created flows and then wireframes of specific jobs-to-be-done on Miro. Using tools to make it faster: We wanted to find ways to work faster and not have to reinvent the wheel. Intercom checklist was a new feature they just released so we tried that out since it was so close to my design. 

[show the new part of the map we were going to focus on (same image from beginning)

[deciding P1s and P2s]

Learnings

01

Bringing visuals is helpful when sharing initial ideas with cross-functional partners.

By sharing low-fidelity explorations and visual references earlier on in the process and inviting engineers to review and give me feedback, I could communicate my designs more clearly and increase collaboration with my team. It's my job to not only design screens but also make sure my team can understand them as easily as possible.

02

Defining clear requirements, doing discovery, and setting expectations early on.

The whole team has to be working towards the same goals and there can't be any confusion on what we are shipping at the end of the day.

03

Adapt the tools to the team.

There's no use in forcing your team to use a tool that isn't working for them. Adapt the tools to your team and lean in to the ways your teammates like to work and collaborate.

timothea wang

is loving every minute leading design at Wonder & Wander to serve mission driven companies.

timothea.wang@gmail.com
linkedin.com/in/timothea

© Timothea Wang 2023 | Based remotely in Davis, CA  | Last updated: Feb 2023