Overview
About:
BRIDGEGOOD is a nonprofit design studio primarily funded by Google.org and the Golden State Warriors. The organization is committed to helping under-represented designers succeed in the tech industry. BRIDGEGOOD provides hands-on learning experiences while focusing on diversity, inclusivity, and accessibility.
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Problem:
“How might we encourage apprentices to remain engaged after the apprenticeship program is over?”
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Solution:
Based on user data, we decided to prioritize BRIDGEGOOD apprentices by providing them with a meaningful reason to remain connected. We created a space where users could support each other in their careers by providing feedback on their resumes and projects.
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Client:
BRIDGEGOOD (board of directors, executive staff, and creatives).
Team:
Designers: Kaitlyn Pang, Amritpal Dhaliwal, Bryan Bowman
Product Manager: Shaun Tai
Engineer: Trung Huynh
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My Role:
UI/UX Designer & Team Lead
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Duration:
2 week sprint
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Design Tools:
Research: Reddit, Facebook, Slack, LinkedIn, Behance
Ideation: Miro, pen, paper
Wire framing and Prototyping: Adobe XD
Visual Design: Adobe Illustrator & Google Material Design
Problem Statement
Through user research, our team discovered that many users struggled to keep connected. While they enjoyed the features on BRIDGEGOOD.com, they explained that the lack of engagement negatively affected their experience. After receiving similar responses, we formed our problem statement: "Although many users utilize the portfolio and free events feature, they struggle to make meaningful connections."
How Might We
Understanding the pain points, we were able to focus on crafting and clustering our "how might we" questions.
Define and Decide
Next, we created a chart to identify who faced these problems, where these problems were occurring, why they were important, and what these problems were. This aided us in creating more focused sets of crazy 8's before dot voting.
Medium-Fidelity
Once we discussed and finalized our crazy 8 votes, we moved onto our medium-fidelity wireframes. We combined several ideas that we liked and created three different tabs: Tips & Tricks, Resume Review, and Just Chill. Our goal was to not only improve engagement and encourage meaningful connections, but we also wanted to offer new resources that could be helpful to a creative's career. We thought that Tips & Tricks could be a place for users to start a thread and share their skills and knowledge with others while resume review could be a place for users to receive helpful feedback on their resume. To further encourage a sense of community, we created Just Chill to allow users to bond outside of the creative field.
High-Fidelity
Before moving onto high-fidelity, we spoke with the product manager and decided to rename Just Chill to a more straight forward name, Chat Room. We also replaced Tips & Tricks with Portfolio Review as we thought that it would be helpful for those wanting to apply for work.
Usability Testing
We conducted several usability tests and had encountered a series of challenges. We realized that we were starting too broad and needed to narrow down our audience. Multiple users indicated that they would not feel comfortable sharing their resume with strangers. This led us to a more focused set of users - apprentices. To make it clear that the users in this community are people they know and trust, we created a members page to display who this feature involved. Users could then add verified BRIDGEGOOD members if they desired. We wanted to ensure a comfortable and safe environment by only allowing verified members to be invited.
"I feel like I would be hesitant to use this feature if it's that broad - if it's anyone you follow because I follow random people."
“This feature might just be for apprentices, in which I would be much more likely to interact.”
Speaking with the project manager, we found that after the apprenticeship was over, most apprentices were not active on BRIDGEGOOD. However, many apprentices shared a strong bond and our goal was to keep that same sense of community. With a more focused target audience, we needed to reassess our feature.
Modified Problem Statement
With the user survey responses as a top priority, we redefined our problem statement. We wondered, “How might we encourage apprentices to remain engaged after the apprenticeship program is over?”
Persona
We then created a persona to best represent our key audience.
User Journey
Our user journey then reflected the steps, pain points, and ah-ha moments that our persona would encounter.
SWOT Analysis
Our SWOT analysis helped us identify BRIDGEGOOD's strengths and areas that may need improvement.
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Strengths: Creating a community of local student creatives by providing access to free events and resources
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Weaknesses: Users become inactive once they run out of incentives.
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Opportunities: Creating more meaningful connections between creatives to help them prepare for their careers.
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Threats: Communication platforms because user can easily chat elsewhere.
Competitive Analysis
We then compared other companies who were successful in terms of communication. This helped us consider methods that we could use in order to improve BRIDGEGOOD's engagement.
Strengths:
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Ongoing communication
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Old discussions become resources
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Can create any thread
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Free
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Weaknesses:
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Too much content due to being unmoderated
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Hard to find the right community
Slack:
Strengths:
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Threaded and direct conversations
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Easy to organize and manage conversations
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Weaknesses:
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Pay for upgraded features
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Have to be added to workspace before chatting
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Facebook:
Strengths:
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Keeping in touch with people you know
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Successful enegagement in community groups
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Free
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Weaknesses:
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Not designed for a specific audience - difficult catering to everyone
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Advertisements
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You data is collected
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Your pictures are owned by Facebook
LinkedIn:
Strengths:
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Professional connections
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Helps toward career
Weaknesses:
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Pay for upgraded features
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Can’t break out of professional environment
Usability Testing
After making changes based on our research, we conducted more usability tests. We found that many users were confused by the portfolio review. They thought that the feature would be to review individual project pieces. After several different attempts to clarify the feature's purpose, we decided to speak with the project manager. We realized that having a project review feature would be much more beneficial for the users rather than having portfolios reviewed as a whole.
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As for the chat feature, many thought that this section was for users to specifically discuss the resume and portfolio reviews. After attempting several different title variations and placements, users still did not find this feature beneficial. While we saw the potential for this feature and wanted users to be able to have a deeper connection beyond critiques, we made the tough decision to remove the feature altogether.
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To allow this community to grow slowly, users could invite verified BRIDGEGOOD members. However, this meant that we would need to consider what would happen if the user got an invitation, accepted or declined the invite, or no longer wanted to remain a member of this feature - Career Corner. We added onto BRIDGEGOOD's notifications and found that users marked them all as read without reading. We had to add several options in case the user overlooked the first notification. While it was a challenge at first, we paid close attention to where users were clicking and determined that we would place the invitation in the dashboard.
Upon receiving positive feedback and a clear understanding of each feature, we decided to move onto the mobile and tablet view.
Final Product
If the user accepts the invitation, they would then have access to the My Career Corner dashboard. It would then let the user know that their uploads would appear there. They could then click to access the Career Corner page and upload/review uploads. However, if the user declined the invitation, they would be taken back to the splash page of BRIDGEGOOD.
Once the user has uploaded their resumes and projects for review, they could easily find their personal uploads in the dashboard.
