Feeder manages 2,000+ festival volunteers.
A failed launch became the platform that runs 2,000 volunteers every year
End‑to‑end UX design for a volunteer management platform — badge scanner, volunteer dashboard, and team lead mini‑dashboard — that delivered the first successful launch in 2024.
Accurate check-in/check-out data meant kitchens could calculate portions correctly. Less waste, less overspend.
Previously, platform numbers and actual attendance rarely matched. Real-time updates from the team lead mini-dashboard fixed that.
Fewer questions and conflicts. Post-festival survey: almost everyone said meal and arrival issues dropped significantly. When something went wrong, there was a clear resolution path.
No precedent. No process. Built it anyway.
I joined in 2024 as the first designer. No designers, no process. The previous launch had failed. With proper UX/UI in 2024, the platform launched fully and is now used every year, enabling management of over 2,000 volunteers.
- Contribution
- UX Research, Interviews, Wireframing, UI Design
- Duration
- 2 months before festival
The scanner needed training, and the office never heard about changes
A small app for scanning volunteer badges at lunch. ~2,000 volunteers, multiple feeding plans, two dining areas. The scanner approves or denies each check-in and feeds into purchase statistics.
In 2023, the scanner was so complicated only specially trained staff could use it. My goal: make it work for kitchen volunteers — no training required. I interviewed people who used it in 2023 and gathered feedback from the kitchen team.
The dashboard handles volunteer management, shift directions, and purchase statistics.
I surveyed the team, dug into the backlog, then interviewed office volunteers who handle check-ins, check-outs, and meal issues. The main insight from the survey was:
Team leads do not promptly notify the office about changes in their volunteers' plans
This leads to volunteers having issues with meals — for example, a volunteer decides to spend a few more days at the festival, but this is not entered into the database, and a portion is not allocated for them.
I interviewed team leads to understand why. Three reasons: no time, the office is physically far from camp, and it's easy to forget.
Need a simplified admin panel for the team leads
Fewer screens where people were in a hurry, group actions where they came in crowds
Inline confirmation instead of a popup
Scanning a badge opened a popup with extra info and two buttons: Feed or Cancel. Nobody read the extra info. The extra screen was also overheating devices — causing the scanner to freeze mid-operation.
On successful scan: a notification appears inline, no separate screen. For errors and edge cases, I kept the extra screen — with actual instructions this time, not just an error state.
Feeding a whole group at once
There was no way to feed a group. Team leads would walk up, grab 40 portions, and none of it hit the statistics.
Added group anonymous feeding.
Volunteer preview and multi‑select
Checking in a volunteer meant navigating to a detail page, finding the right fields, editing, saving. Multiply that by a group arriving at once.
Added a volunteer preview with only the important fields visible up front. Added multi-selection — filter volunteers, select all with one click, verify the list, issue badges. Group check-in went from painful to fast.
Badge scan jumps straight to the profile
Names and nicknames repeat. Searching each volunteer manually burned time.
Badge scanner that jumps straight to a volunteer's profile. Added group badge scanning too — no more hunting through lists.
2024 was the first successful launch. The platform now runs every year for 2,000+ volunteers.
Happy to walk through the parts that did not fit here. Let's get on a call.