Street Smart
Street Smart is a project I've designed for Your Own Home NGO, that works in the north of Israel to provide housing services to homeless people and bureaucratic help. The NGO aspires to find a technological solution that matches homeless people with the help they need, and by that they would be able to expand their activity to more people in need.
Problems
Moti and Linoy, the NGO's directors highlighted the problems they are facing when trying to expand their work to more and more people in need.
A lot of private people, other NGOs, and institutions, are offering their amazing help and services, but it's hard for people in the street to get this information.
Looking for governmental help is a bureaucratic nightmare for people who are not social workers.
There are many people living in the street that can get some immediate help just by getting the right information.
Today, match-making the people in need and the help is done by a conversation with the NGO's activist.
Research
Around 85% of homeless people in Israel have a smartphone.
Homeless people that have no smartphone can address almost anybody on the streets, asking for help using their phones. No personal data is being collected.
Other NGOs will use the tool more often if it would have a neutral name, that is not associated with Your Own Home NGO.
Individuals will have a simple-to-operate tool, they can use to help people in the streets.
Solution
Street Smart is a tool for matchmaking help resources with needs, based on location, categories, age, gender, social services status, and more.
While setting the goals of the app, we tried to understand who are our potential users and identify their needs and pain points. Later we started creating wireframes and user flows.
Matchmaking
The user gets to choose how much he wants to filter the results he's getting on the app, when the location is the default filter.
Other filters he can use are the main category, social services status, age, gender, religious affiliation, admission terms and more
Human response
Due to the variety of languages and mental abilities, we decided to create an easy to use list of hotline numbers, to make it easier to get the right humane response.
Asking for the NGO's help
The option to write directly to the NGO, asking for more personal help, is also available.
Adding the information
To make the admin's life a bit easier I'd designed a platform to enter the data behind the resources of help. There he, and other volunteers, can also view, edit, and delete existing data.
It's not over yet
For our next step, we would like to start researching the next potential users - any individual that wants to offer services that can help.
That way we can not only make the NGO's work easier, but we can also use it as a social tool, and direct the community on how to help and take action.
Photo by Kaique Rocha from Pexels