An Event Hub for Grad Students
Branding // UX // UI Project
The task I was given
A couple of founders asked me to lead the design of screens and a logo for a social app tailored to organising grad school groups and their events
What was the planing process like?
The thing that makes it difficult for me in regard to early stage founders is not knowing you audience and target well enough. In this case I had a lot of interviewing and research to do before even getting to a design kickoff. The key here was that they had a target market with a loose plan of how to break into it (friends / partners who were completing grad degrees).
So the first task was to get all the founders humming on the same song, using an exercise of drawing out what idea they had for the software and it resulted in 3 of the founders having different features being the bulk of the work we would make, so it took a bit of time to philosphically get on the same page.
What was the production process like?
Once we established that we wanted people to connect through profiles first, it became an MVP.
It was necessary to me up with a design system of reusable elements that we could elaborate on further down the line whether I was still designing it or not.
What did you deliver?
I ended up designing 3 different user flows a) sign-in, which was obvious and necessary, but also b) profiles and how you would upload interests c) a scheduling system.
“You learn more in failure and I gained some valuable collaborators long-term with renewed knowledge for our next projects.”
It was still covid pandemic area so I was fortunate I as still getting project thrown my way and I was a little skeptical about the industry as it is a hard one to break through and the long term prospects and the commitment of the founders was a concern, but being able to have full control of the design process is always appealing to any creative and having the 2 conflicting ideas of whether you take a project is something that has allowed me to be much more selective in the future, to my benefit.
“I learned that building trust through transparency and communication goes a long way with confidence.”
— The communicator in me