Design Challenge

One of the great things about being in a community is the access to different perspectives, knowledge, and skills. Within an academic and/or business setting, that access becomes invaluable as members seek to improve themselves and their work.

Client

optiMize believes students can change the world. The student-led social incubator provides an environment of learning and mentorship for a community of approximately 2,500 students and members to work and collaborate on self-directed projects that make a positive impact. optiMize awards fellowship funding for projects every summer, and thus far have funded 80 projects over the span of six cohorts. For more information on the client, please read here.

Methodology

As the Research Lead, I emphasized evidence as the primary driver of our design decisions. To be as comprehensive as we could given the time constraints, we focused our efforts on the following three aspects of user research:

• Project Management Tool Survey - identify common PM tools and potential target interviewees

• In-person Interviews - contextualizes survey responses and provides deeper insights into user behaviors

• Market Research - understand core functionalities that make PM and mentorship tools successful

Project Management Survey

We needed to be informed on user behaviors and attitudes in order to accurately design user flows. We aimed to gather respondents who had experience with PM tools, are potential users of PM tools, or have had mentorship or collaboration experience. We received 52 survey respondents.

♦️Market Research

We researched the core functionalities of competing project management tools identified in the survey and interviews, and took into account what features were absolutely necessary for successful project management. We also investigated similar organizations to understand what tools and functionalities they employed for their own systems. Such an example is MENTOR, a national mentoring non-profit that developed proprietary mentoring software that builds mentor-student relationships and tracks their progress.

Key Takeaways

From our research, we came away with a few key takeaways as we began to design the first prototype. First, the final product should be able to increase transparency, ease of use, and collaboration between team members and the community. This emphasized our project’s purpose, and fulfilled optiMize’s user need.

Second, the following features were utilized most often within project management:

• tagging or mentioning teammates — increases transparency and accountability

• role assignments — gives each person marching orders and keeps them accountable

• organizational structure for file storage — mandatory for good performance

• interoperability and integrations — provides familiarity and ease of use for new or reluctant users

• cohesive tool functionality — keeping all PM tools within one place for convenience

Third, in order for this product to be practical, we needed to keep the system intuitive and easy to use, and ensure that efficient roll-out and training is provided to new users.

*for more details on my research methodology for this project, please visit the full case study here.

Hypothesis

Using our research takeaways, we developed the following hypothesis to frame our design process:

We believe that additional project management and community building functionalities — surrounding and supporting the core functionality of a community directory — could further foster community and collaboration for optiMize users.

♦️Information Architecture

Based on our hypothesis, our vision for the community application focuses on two distinct parts of optiMize. For the community building aspect, we adhered to the project requirements of a search and discover functionality. We were able to be more creative in designing the project management side, which included common PM functionalities that interconnected with community pages. We struggled to determine which community and PM elements to include on the home page upon logging in, but ultimately decided on personal notifications and action items based on our usability feedback.

Rapid Prototyping and Usability Testing

We iterated on our prototypes twice before reaching our final high fidelity clickable prototype, starting from paper prototypes to Axure mid-fidelity and high-fidelity. Between prototype iterations, we performed usability tests with five users each round.

Low-Fidelity: Paper Prototype

Drawing from our user and wire flows, we created a low-fidelity prototype using pen and paper. These pages included the on-boarding process, the home page, and the community search page, which we used for our first round of usability testing with 5 users.

Whiteboarding

During our usability testing, we noted users’ likes and dislikes, which informed us of the necessary adjustments to information architecture and interaction elements. To organize our usability test findings with our research findings, we taped our paper prototypes to a whiteboard, allowing us a visual understanding of the changes we needed to implement for our low-fidelity clickable prototype.

*We simultaneously built out the rest of the wireframes in mid-fidelity and casually tested with users to ensure we were effectively implementing all of the feedback we had received.

We built this prototype based on the feedback of potential users — to ensure that it truly fits the needs of our target audience, the optiMize community, we would like to test and iterate on our current prototype once more. This achieves two goals: to customize the product for its target user base, and to foster buy-in from the community before optiPortal is launched and implemented.

Furthermore, we prioritized functionality over visual design in order to accomplish our objectives for this project. To become a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), future iterations should consider and incorporate visual design elements.

Finally, as per our user research, we highly suggest optiMize to develop a roll-out and maintenance plan prior to implementation, and to consider a system administrator who would oversee regular training, system updates, and data integrity.

Things I Learned:

♦️Competitive Analysis

Researched core functionalities of competing project management tools to identify absolutely necessary features for successful project management.

♦️Information Architecture

Understanding users’ expectations of content organization to decide on which elements of project management and community directory to include on specific pages.

♦️User Interaction

Ensured that specific tasks could be executed as efficiently as possible by observing usability testers’ reactions and expectations on page content and links.

View my other student projects