Portfolio
Designed.org Case Study
providing equal access to design education
WHat is designed.org?
Designed.org is a non-profit whose vision is to be the global career growth platform for designers and design leadership. Their goal is to empower the designers of tomorrow through educational tools and mentoring. They prioritize opportunities to teach and grow; approach every interaction with empathy and humility, and recognize that everyone has the capacity to motivate and inspire.
The vision
Design education for all. To provide equal access to educational resources and mentor for designers globally.
My role
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User Survey
As a volunteer product designer, I work with 3 senior designers on the Resources and Learning Team. Our objective is to conceptualize how Designed.org will provide resources in the digital design field to help budding designers.
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User Interviews
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Wireframes
TOOLS
Figma, Miro, Google Forms
defining
our persona
Our first team discussion was around to cater to the learning resources. What level of seniority, with what medium, for what demographic? The first step was to understand the problem space. To help us answer this question and the type of resources sought after and how people progressed in their careers, I created a user survey to distribute to the design community.
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surveys
INTERVIEWS
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We looked at the resources utilized, how people learned design and wanted to figure out how we could incorporate these things into our own resource/course offering.
digging deeper with user interviews
While the team was leaning towards focusing on people just starting out in UI/UX design, we moved on to interviews to dive deeper into the survey responses. We had a great range of interviewees with different experience levels ranging from under a year to 10+ years.
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After we conducted our respective interviews, we went through an affinity mapping experience to extract themes we could focus on in the next phase and created our persona Rachel.
Figure 2. Primary persona Rachel.
After discussing each of our insights, we formed several problem statements for our persona Rachel:
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How might we enable Rachel to stay accountable for her progress?
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How might we develop and provide a community for Rachel to lean on and grow with?
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How might we incorporate mentors and design advisors into the curriculum?
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We concluded from our ideation sessions to move forward with a 12-week cohort-style design curriculum. We wanted to address the community aspect and give Rachel an opportunity to not only work on projects with a greater purpose, but also with other designers and a mentor to advise the cohort.
DIVING INTO WIREFRAMES
Our team decided to divide the work into 3 different flows.
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Curriculum catalog flow
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Course flow
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Course review flow
Figure 3. Proposed design for curriculum catalog.
We want to give people the option to either learn on their own or join a design cohort.