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Project Overview

To design a platform that makes UX resources easy to create, find, understand and implement.

hmwUX is a design concept for a community-driven platform that empowers UX professionals through insights into the tools, and methods, making learning easy.

Thesis project
UX research
Content creation
Dashboard
View prototype

Project details

🎓 Graduate thesis project

User Research: Desk research, Competitor analysis, User Interviews, Surveys, User Persona , User Journey Mapping and Information Architecture.
Design: Sketches, Wireframing, Material based Design system, Prototyping, Usability Testing
Duration: Three Months
Role: Solo designer for final thesis project

Tools: Figma, Figjam, Miro and Maze.

Technology now has the single largest impact on an organization’s ability to react, innovate and succeed. Today’s industry leaders have embraced this and literally changed. Of course, everyone uses technology to change in different ways, but we believe customers can take.

Rapid growth in digital and mobile technology is changing the advertising industry, and the UK is leading the charge, with digital set to claim more than half of all advertising spend in 2016, according to a recent report from marketing.

Problem

Novice designers grapple with understanding and executing comprehensive UX processes

The process of understanding and implementing comprehensive UX processes is often overwhelming for novice designers.
Uneven resource distribution: While references for user interface (UI) design are abundant, there is a lack of proper guidance on critical UX methodologies with real-world applications.
Guidance on critical UX methodologies with real-world applications is scarce, creating knowledge gaps and hindering the development of well-rounded, user-centric designs.
Research insights

Key insights discovered through qualitative and quantitative research

🤷 90% of novice designers struggled with presenting design insights and conducting research.
🔎 90% find it challenging to discover and apply new research methods.

Especially for niche industries and devices.

🎒  80% start their research on Google but have go-to resources for the design stage.

Lack of guidance on UX methodologies with real-world applications forces designers to explore multiple platforms.

🧺 90% create personal toolkits, but 80% struggle with disorganization.
🔬Designers prefer filtering resources based on ease of access, budget constraints, and creator reliability.
🚀  70% of designers engage in self-directed projects to build their portfolio and personal brand after entering the professional world.
Solution

A community-driven platform  that empowers UX professionals through insights into the tools, and methods, making learning easy.

Establishing design outcomes
User Research

Centralization: Provide a single, comprehensive platform where designers can easily find diverse resources essential to the UX design process, eliminating the struggle of searching across multiple sources.

Empowerment: Equip designers with insights into the best tools and references available for different phases of the UX process, enabling them to make informed decisions.

Collaboration: Foster a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing among designers, promoting a sense of community and collective growth.

Hi-fidelity mockups

How might we equip UX professionals with the necessary tools and insights to implement UX methodologies confidently?

This platform helps users by focusing on searchability,  scannability, and learnability of the content.

How might we

Make the onboarding journey useful

Incorporating user preferences and goals to share content that aligns with user needs. It allows users to select their disciplines, industries of interest, professional goals and frequency of content recommendations.

How might we

Make discovering resources easy

  • User can search for resources based on topics, rating, cost, and template type.
  • They can further filter resources based on design stage, area of expertise, and industry.
  • They can view all the filtered parameters and preview resource to gauge it’s relevance.
How might we

Improve the learnability and resource utilization

Structured format that distinguishes various methodologies within each design stage, ensuring clarity and ease of navigation.

What I focused on to ensure learnability:

  • Insights : Information on purpose, workings, and outcomes for each methodology.
  • Ease of access: Direct access to templates for practical design application.
  • Organization: Help users organize resources by recommending apt folder and insights about unused resources.
  • Support & dialogue: Quick clarification on any doubts and general enquiries about the project.
How might we

Help novice UXers grow?

  • Keeping them motivated through gamification by celebrating achievements which align with their disciplines of interest.
  • Recommending resources and UX experts they can follow based on their areas of interest, discovered during the onboarding journey.

How might we help content creators? ✍🏼

By making content creation simple, helping them get visibility & community building.

While creating an account they add their personal and professional details. Encourage content creators to follow community guidelines to avoid bad actors.

Ensuring the process of creating a project is easy and allows customization. The process involves adding basic details then organizing the methodologies within design stage. The creator have tips and can use AI for help if needed.

This view celebrates achievements of creators by sharing valuable insights into their impact. Creators can track their project's reach, engagement metrics, and revenue generated, fuelling their drive to create useful projects.

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Roadmap to the design process

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Discovery

- Desk research
- Discovery interviews
- Competitor analysis.

Go to discovery
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Definition

- Survey
- In-depth interviews
- User personas

Go to definition
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Ideation

- User stories
- User journey

Go to ideation
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Design

- Low fidelity wireframes
- High-fidelity prototypes
- Usability testing  

Go to design
Discovery

Understanding UXer's pain points across the design process

During product workshop, I analyzed the transaction creation funnel and came up with three concrete use cases that we could explore: limits on calculator i.e payment or delivery method error, country based limits and tier based limits on individual.
Breaking down and exploring individual use cases, enabled easier execution, evaluation, and refinement.

Omniversity platform
This graph represents the user drop-off at various stages in the money transfer funnel.
Fidelity Image
32.7% drop-off observed for active users between creating a transaction and it being processed within the app.

Analysis: Aimed to pinpoint drop-off points in the payment flow and assess completed transaction rates.

Useflow Map Image
Useflow Map Image
🔍 Discovery

Understanding UXer's pain points across the design process

Tools: Miro and Figjam
Concept Image

Desk Research

Explored existing resources for UX/UI processes and methodologies across various mediums. Here is what I dicovered:

  • During the desk research, it was found that there is a wide range of resources available resources on varied platforms and of varied mediums.
  • There is a disparity between the resources availability, while references for user interface (UI) design are abundant, there is a lack of proper guidance on critical UX methodologies with real-world applications.
  • Resources are easy to access but some are paid through a freemium model.

Discovery interviews

Conducted 4 in-depth interviews with mainstream and extreme users like students and UX professionals to discover:

  • Large companies' design guidelines and resources are widely referenced, as participants perceive them to exemplify industry best practices.
  • Novice designers struggle more to find resources relevant to the research stage.
  • Finding context-relevant resources aligned with specific problem statements is challenging.
  • Designers like to build their own curated toolkits of references.
View insights
Concept Image
Concept Image

Competitor analysis

Researched on existing solutions and outlined opportunities for improvement.

  • Effective search functionality and clear categorization are crucial for discoverability and ease of navigation when accessing design resources.
  • Quality indicators like ratings, reviews, are important when content is user generated and not curated as reduce the cognitive load and ensuring relevance of search results.
  • Offering a diverse range of resources, spanning devices, design stages and methodologies, is essential to cater to the specific needs of the design community.
  • Opportunities exist for providing curated, context-specific resources, such as case studies, alongside downloadable resources for ease of use.
View insights

Workflow

I introduced a feature that automated data inception, analytics, and report generation pipeline for repetitive company processes. It was based on user insights and became the most used feature, leading to creating of a self-serve feature on the platform that the companies could themselves use to create their own workflows.

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🪢 Definition

Getting quantitative and qualitative validation of insights:

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Survey

Based on the themes identified in the discovery interviews and opportunities discovered in the competitive analysis, I created a survey to get quantitative validation and broader insights to complement qualitative findings.

  • ⚠️ Main challenges: Users face challenges in finding new research methods, relevant examples, and deciding on research methods to use. Implementing research methods and finding tools for research pose challenges for many users.
  • 📊 Resource utilization: Users heavily rely on Google, YouTube, Figma community, and design case studies for research and design stages. Most users have personal collections of saved resources. They know where to search for resources but face challenges in finding high-quality resources and feel overwhelmed by the abundance of online resources.

Conducted 3 interviews with UX professionals with less than two years of experience to dig deeper to understand the motivations, pain points of the target audience discovered during surveys.

Themes identified

🤷 Main struggles for novice UX designers  
  • 90% struggled more with the research stage than the design stage. Most start research on Google but have go-to resources for the design stage.
  • Finding relevant examples, especially in niche industries is significantly challenging.
  • Justifying design decisions and presenting design insights is a struggle.
🚀 Self improvement
  • Users engage in self-directed projects, follow influential designers, read articles to keep learning and growing.
  • UXers like to create content and mentor others to improve their personal brand.
🎒 Resource utilization
  • UXers like to filter resources based on ease of access, budget constraints, and creator reliability.
  • UXers create personal toolkits but struggle with disorganization.
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User Personas

Combining the insights from both the in-depth interviews, I discovered that my primary target audience is UXers with less than 2 years of experience looking to improve their skills and get more relevant world experience.

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Persona: New grad with internship experience aspiring to be a UX generalist.

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💡 Ideation

User stories

Created four user stories for members and one for content creators to define the primary goals of using the platform. Referencing the personas and themes identified through research to created stories that speak to their needs, goals and frustrations.

Useflow Map Image
Useflow Map Image

User journey mapping using the Kano Model

Used Kano model as an extension of user journey mapping to objectively outline requirements and to stay aligned with customer needs when deciding which features to include and prioritize.

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🎨 Design
Low fidelity wireframes to iterate and validate ideas

The journey to creating low-fidelity wireframes involved exploratory sketching to rapidly iterate and validate ideas before advancing to more detailed wireframes.

Useflow Map Image
Use flow Image

Establishing design outcomes

A community-driven platform  that empowers UX professionals through insights into the tools, and methods, making learning easy.
User Research

Centralization: Provide a single, comprehensive platform where designers can easily find diverse resources essential to the UX design process, eliminating the struggle of searching across multiple sources

Empowerment: Equip designers with insights into the best tools and software available for different phases of the UX process, enabling them to make informed decisions.

Collaboration: Foster a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing among designers worldwide, promoting a sense of community and collective growth.

Story Image
Story Image
Usability Testing

Conducted a formative usability test with 3 participants using Maze to evaluate the following:

1. Evaluate the preliminary design concepts and information architecture.
2. Identify usability issues early in the design process.
3. Gather feedback to inform design iterations.

Findings of the usability test

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Design Image
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⚠️ Issue: Unclear messaging and content on the home page.

☑️ Solution: Updated the home page design to provide a more comprehensive and clear view of the platform's purpose, offerings, and value proposition. Ensure the content and messaging effectively communicate what users can expect from the platform

⚠️ Issue: Users could navigate to relevant sections but faced challenges in completing tasks directly.

☑️ Solution: Analyzed the specific areas where users encountered difficulties through heat maps and mis-clicks and identified confusing elements and addressed them through design improvements and better guidance.

⚠️ Issue: Users wanted to explore content creators and experts before accessing resources.

☑️ Solution: Introduce a dedicated section in the "learnings" tab that showcases UX experts and content creators related to user's various areas of interest . This section would allow users to follow and explore the experts' profiles, and resources before diving into the learning materials.

Final Prototype

Updated designs based on iterations using feedback from the usability tests

Go to high-fidelity mockups

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