Role: UX & UI Designer, UX Researcher, Design Lead
Team: Miykaelah Sinclair, Caleb Ha
Tools: Figma, Zeplin, Whiteboard
Methods: SOW, Screener Surveys, User & Contextual Interviews, Affinity Mapping, User Persona, Journey Mapping, Design Studio, MoSCoW Map, Sketching, Wireframes, Rapid Prototyping, Usability Testing, Specifications Document
Challenge
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To help data science, ML & AI students build their portfolios before they graduate by connecting them with real companies' projects.
Insight
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Students need access to real projects with interesting datasets & mentors to help them work on their soft skills.
Solution
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A trusted platform that focuses on connecting students with projects & provide mentoring opportunities.
Focusing on one target user
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We had 3 target users for this project (students, companies & project experts) & focused only on students for this 3-week design sprint. We interviewed 7 students, a company representative & a university professor and synthesized our research findings to create our persona.
Goal: To showcase her unique value to potential employers
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Need: To have expert guidance & develop her soft skills
Sofia
Behaviors: Utilizes her network to find work & projects
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Pain Point: Relies on school to get access to private data sources
Sofia's journey
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While taking a closer look at Sofia's mental model through her journey of searching & choosing a dataset for a group school project, we came across a couple of opportunities where we can help her to achieve her goals.
How might we help Sofia showcase her unique value to employers while providing her with the support and guidance she needs to land her dream job?
Why a desktop site?
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Our research showed that 7/7 users did their project related research on desktop or a laptop.
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Feature prioritization
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For this 3 week design sprint we focused on our MVP and testing it to get feedback from students so we prioritized
the must have features through a MoSCoW map.
Design ideation
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My team and I held 7 design studio sessions to brainstorm solutions and layouts for bizdevIQ's website. We created a platform where Sofia can browse company projects that are tailored to her interests & connect with mentors to guide her and help develop her soft skills.
From sketches to mid-fi
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Sofia can read about bizdevIQ's site & the projects they offer, she can customize her profile & add her skills to showcase her unique value to the companies she's trying to work with.
Solving Sofia's pain point
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Using bizdevIQ's special algorithm, Sofia will have access to projects with real datasets that are specifically matched to her profile & interests.
Providing expert guidance
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Our research showed that having mentorship is crucial for students who are navigating these complex programs and we're solving that by providing students with mentoring opportunities.
Mid-Fi testing insights
5/5
users were able to login to their account, find a project & ask to join it
5/5
users were able to find a mentor with their same discipline & ask to meet
2/5
did not click on filters first & rechecked after being asked of an alternative
Progressing to Hi-Fidelity
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After a successful usability testing round where the users completed their tasks easily and quickly I led creating the hi-fi prototype using Figma.
Adding the team page
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After getting feedback from bizdevIQ's stakeholders that companies sometimes hire the students they've worked with we created a team page where Sofia and her team can showcase their previous projects & skills to potential employers.
Iterating based on feedback
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Based on the feedback from usability testing we made some changes to the projects and mentors dashboard pages to improve Sofia's experience.
Project & mentor pages
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We made minor updates to the project & mentor brief pages. We showed the details Sofia would need when signing up for a project or connecting with a mentor.
Hi-Fi testing insights
6/6
users were able to login & finish 2 tasks of finding a project & a mentor
3/6
users wanted to know more specifics about the data of the project
5/6
did not know what's the website about based on the homepage content
Preparing the design handoff
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After having the hi-fi prototype ready we prepared for the developers' handoff so they can build the MVP and take the users' feedback into the next iteration.
Next Steps:
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Explore adding a feature for “sharing” projects with teammates on the site.
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Building out the team pages, company pages, resource pages, events pages, etc.
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Conduct research on the 2 other target users (companies & project experts).
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Further usability testing on the updates made.
* in-depth medium case study coming soon