protect your identity,
tell your story
April 2022 - June 2022
Stephen Dow, Meishi Li
Christopher Bones, Austin Huynh, Han Nguyen, Riley Liu, Grace Zheng
UX Researcher, UX Designer, Video & Voice Director
In light of recent events and legislation, there has been a wave of anti-trans and gender discriminatory laws. These types of social issues are what led to the creation of Oaidis, an anonymous crowdfunding platform where individuals can find financial support for sensitive issues where revealing their identities is not ideal for safety and other motivations.
Individuals in the LGBTQIA+ space find themselves in tight positions when it comes to healthcare. Many in particular expressed difficulty accessing affordable and safe providers and services, especially for those who are considering gender transitioning.
The features of this experience can be broken down as follows:
Each campaign starter creates an account with our service and sets up an initial verification meeting with our internal team to ensure the integrity of our service.
One of the main challenges with anonymous crowdfunding is thinking of ways to inspire empathy for the campaign. Without the pictures and personal touch, it is tricky to convince people to support a cause.
To address this unique challenge, we partner with local LGBTQIA+ centers to bring on board volunteer voice actors, who will read and record the anonymous stories attached to each campaign.
.gif)
Following the campaign publishing, donors are able to browse stories on the campaign page and donate to different causes. Campaign starters are able to interact anonymously with donors by providing updates and thanks.
.gif)
.jpg)
External factors such as finances or where patients live greatly impacts availability of care. Particularly for individuals living in conservative regions, finding adequate support for sexual and gender affirming care is particularly challenging.
Confidentiality is desired, even from communities like friends and families. While friends and families are often trusted individuals, there are times when prejudices can severely impact the state of these relationships and jeopardize safety.
Whether it is because of the region patients may be living in, or their own concern for their privacy, there is a trend towards some sort of private service that can help support these individuals in their healthcare journey.
Using these findings, we drew up potential solutions for providing confidential resources and got feedback through interviews with some participants.
One of our most popular solution proposals with users was an anonymous healthcare financial resource.
We originally considered building on this solution to create an insurance company, but discovered that this did not seem feasible, as insurance companies require having a large pool of people contributing to be successful. Since we are targeting a specific community, this would likely not work.
We continued to ideate and looking into financial resources in general. A competitive analysis revealed that there was a huge opportunity in crowdfunding services. Specifically:
Popular crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe and Fundly require identities to be made explicit. They furthermore do not support certain issues in the sexual health space, such as offering support for abortions.
Crowdfunding services seemed like a promising solution for individuals who need funding for issues such as gender affirming care. The requirement of public identity in existing services makes this option significantly less safe for individuals who need to keep their identities private.
Two tension points can be identified given the current possibilities allowed by existing fundraising solutions.
Our proposal aims to eliminate those tensions.
Placing our proposal into the previously conducted competitive analysis allows us to immediately see where additional value can be added.
With our testing sessions, we primarily wanted to focus on three research objectives:
Does our current campaign creation feel secure?
Does video and voice build empathy for potential donors? Will they want to donate?
Do potential donors find our platform trustworthy?
We recruited a two concierge MVPs, or users who would be interested in being early adopters of our service if we launched as a startup. Through their feedback, we made two key changes to our prototypes:
This felt very easy, but there's also kind of a scariness to it… I would be concerned loading such personal information up to a website… it just feels like I’m uploading it into the ether.
— Campaign Starter Concierge MVP
Visuals help but i think that the stories can speak for themselves. Having too much of the visuals could be kind of distracting.
— Donor Concierge MVP
This project was the first one where I considered real-world business feasibility and thought of solutions that would be successful given the current social, economic, and technological climate. Most notably, I learned how to pivot ideas when original concepts appeared like ones which would fail as a business.
I furthermore had a chance to incorporate my skills with audio and video into my design solution and create a solution which I could see having the power to really make a difference for a community close to my heart. Moving forward, I feel that my newly acquired skills of analyzing how designs may do in real world settings would be extremely valuable applied to new opportunities.
