Voluny: A Simple Volunteer App

Volunteering made simple, that is our goal.

Voluny serves as a quick and easy Volunteering App. The target audiences for Voluny are both people who are looking for volunteer experiences and for organizations to post their open opportunities. The goal of Voluny is to make the user experience seamless, without any confusion. Volunteers can join, search, and apply for volunteer experiences within a few minutes. Let's Volunteer Together!

The iOS application was developed using Swift and Xcode and Sketch was used for UI and UX design as well as prototyping. The application uses a few Google Cloud services such as Firebase to provide authentication, database and cloud storage. The app also makes use of Google Places API to get auto-completion results of the cities in the world as the user starts searching for cities. In addition, Google Geocoding API was also used during the development to translate geographic coordinates into human readable addresses.

Voluny is compatible with any iOS device that is running on iOS 11 or above. The application is optimised for iPhone screen sizes in portrait mode. A typical user device is an iPhone X with a 5.8-inch OLED screen with a 2436-by-1125-pixel resolution at 458 ppi.

Voluny allows anyone to look up volunteer experiences around their area to help out their community. As the volunteer, they can apply to as many as they want. After you apply, you can easily keep track of your applications to see if you are a good match to what the organization is looking for, receive all the information you need to start without having to contact back and forth with the organizations. With our app as the recruiter, who is seeking volunteers for your organization, you can post new volunteer experiences within minutes without complicated hassles.

The idea of Voluny volunteer app sparked to us in the Summer of 2018, when we faced the struggle of finding volunteer experiences online, which made us realize how stressful it was to find the opportunity to do something good for the community, which should not be the case. We came up with VOLUNY and executed our ideas in July 2018 and finished in January 2019.

Our goal was to build something that has an impact on our society. We discovered the challenge that finding volunteer experiences takes a lot of time and the process was just painful. We agreed that finding volunteer experiences should not be stressful or take forever. Unfortunately, there are no reliable sources for this. So, this was it, this was the problem that we had to solve by creating an innovative and well designed app from scratch which we decided to name Voluny.

The hardest part of designing Voluny was to make sure the combination of the user experience and the user interface is working seamlessly together. Again, we focus on the community and the user, our goal is to make sure people found what they needed in this app without feeling stressful or confusing like other volunteer/non profit websites. We finally found a balance of way to make the app easy to use and but also, eye-catching.

Voluny is a winner of the Iron A' Design Award in 2019. This award is given to well-designed, practical, and innovative creations that meet professional and industrial requirements. Voluny is respected for integrating industry best practices and competent technical characteristics, providing fulfillment and positive feelings, contributing to a better world.