UX/UI PROJECT

OVERVIEW:
Sprint duration: 3 weeks
‍Brief type: Client, Desktop Website
‍Deliverables: High-fidelity prototype and client presentation
‍Tools used: Miro and Figma
‍Team: 4 junior UX designers, Christopher Barlow, India Berrow, Leo Wong and Lela Grzybowska.
‍My role: Conducting user interviews, usability testings and creating the prototype for the blog’s wireframes.
‍

WHO ARE UTOPIC0DE?
‍
UTOPIC0DE is a remote company based in London but with a distributed team (some team members are in LatAm) who centralise, pre-qualify and upskill tech talent from Latin America through each community to connect them with job opportunities all over the world. Their goal is to qualify tech talent (with a focus on soft skills) to either direct them to positions or direct talent to learning places until they can improve. 

DELIVERABLES:
‍
We were asked to incorporate a full design of a new social community feature that will allow users to connect in an engaging way through the Platform. The goal is that this will foster a sense of community, bring students together to learn and support each other. We needed to produce the below deliverables by the end of 3 weeks:


  • Research insight & findings concerning competitors, user types, and behavior
  • Personas and scenarios
  • Experience map/User journeys
  • Information Architecture
  • Design and usability recommendations for improvement
  • Product Sketches and wireframes
  • High fidelity mock-up and prototype of design
  • Final presentation to the client summarising UX work.

Research.

Conducted in depth Competitive and Comparative Research to better understand how community platforms work. Through this we realised we neeed to:

Find a way to navigate through the sheer volume of content that is on a community platform.

How to create a safe and positive space without toxic elements of online trolls.

Find a way to differentiate ourselves to other platforms.

Synthesise.

To gain insights we conducted interviews with software developers this was a challenge for us as we could not get many developers to interview from Latin America so expanded our demographic to Europe and USA. We found trends to help synthesise our data.

Developers are passive and prefer to solve problems themselves before going onto a community platform.

The painpoint is that there is too much content to scan through and questions should be filtered.

‍

Define.

We conducted a Design Studio session with the clients to create and gather ideas together along with their software engineer to help with the design solution. We then proceeded with rounds of usability testing from low-high fidelity prototypes in Figma and found the following findings:

We needed a simple and fun onboarding process.

Users wanted to follow each other and receive notifications on blog posts and forum threads that were of interest to them.

1. Interactive Map

Great for users to find each other in the community.

2. Machine learning system

An algorithm, that can filter questions and scan for similar threads on the forums

3. Specialised profile

Create a profile page that caters for your interests.

Deliver.

  • Using the lean UX approach and after multiple tests we came to deliver our high fidelity prototype. According to the insights we gained we felt that having a community platform would benefit Utopicode and will bring more engagement to the site.
  • We presented to the clients and validated our design decisions through our deep research.

Next Steps.

  • To review data analytics to measure engagement and see if there is an increase in completed user profiles.
  • Test Prototype with Latin American users.
  • Conduct more testing on the high fidelity prototype.

What I learned.

This project was a fantastic experience which helped me develop my skills in all aspects of UX.
‍
As a team we worked very well together having daily stand ups, communicating honestly and accepting constructive feedback.

Managing deadlines and having all deliverables ready for clients by end of 3 week sprint.

Making sure that we got enough insights from testing and user interviews to validate our design decisions throughout the process.

Testimonials.

"Lela worked with UTOPIC0DE designing the new UX experience for our users. She did an amazing job researching and really grasping our users needs. She also led other team members in the process communicating effectively and reached all of the challenging milestones. Would love to work with her again in the future."

Maria Emilia Torres Pelayo
Co-founder of Utopic0de




‍

Meet my Cody!

The onboarding process for Utopicode gives users access to create their own avatars to create a digitally safe space.

Check out the prototype below!