Working Together Apart: A UX Case Study In Group Design
UX work remote style, is never easy. You know what else isn’t easy? Community design projects. In a brand new design tool. That you’ve never used. And creating best practices and UI toolkits that you have also never done before. Ever. All through a zoom screen.
If that doesn’t explain the number of hurdles that this project threw directly in my and my teammates faces, I don’t know what will.
Anyway, after three works of work, we were able to come up with a pretty amazing hifi prototype for our client, Plugged, in the job search space.
I won’t bore you with the specifics of the project, I’ll just highlight the important things!
Plugged wanted a mobile site that included an interaction feature, specifically a swiping action, as well as a way to search jobs and networking events.
This project had two parts. One was individuals, the other was collaborative.
We spent the first week apart, doing tons of research and user interviews, all for our own individual projects.
Then, coming back together, we spent the second week of our deadline working through different wireframes, sketching screen concepts, and compiling data we felt could inform our collective decisions.
After doing a series of user interviews, four to be exact, I was able to conclude some things, and created three user persona based on the main pain points. It was important for me to create more than persona because the content of my user interviews relived that even though Plugged had an audience in mind, those people were not going to be the only users logging into the site.
Finishing up my personal work was one thing, but being able to take key features from my own project and present them to the group was another. I pulled three features I thought were really important. Job and event cards for user to match with, a bio section in the profile, and a bottom global navigation, as pictured above.
After finishing lofi work, I actually started all the way after making a moodboard and a color pallet. I like the idea of being able to brand a company or product. And these tools helped me flesh out my finished product.
After a round of usability testing with a lofi prototype my team created, we put together our polished mockup! During our usability testing phase, we discovered that a back button was needed, and that we also needed to explain the context of the icons and what a user could do.
“I can’t go back from here. Oh okay. Cool.” Plugged usability testing pull quote.
Three main observations can be concluded from this project. It’s one thing to learn how to design for a user, it’s another thing to collaborate on a design when you have already made up your mind about your own.
Iteration is key.
Planning out projects and giving yourself a time line and action to take is really important not just because you have a deadline, but without each person in my group coming in with visuals, wireframes, and concepts, we would never have been able to produce what we ended up with.
Working together in a team, I was not only able to create something amazing on my own, but able to work together with other amazing designers to create something that took the best of each one of our projects.
Check out a recording of the finished product! The first one is my solo product, the second one is the group!
