Graffinity: UX Design for EdTech
Scope: UI/UX for Landing Page, Identity design
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Duration: 4 weeks
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Skill Areas: Stakeholder Engagement, Design Strategy, Information Design, Digital and Paper Prototyping, UX Writing, Design System
Tools: Interpretation and Abductive reasoning, Ideation Workshop, Affinity Map, Wire frames, Miro & Adobe XD
Background
Design Task
My Role
This is a short project born out of a collaboration with the UoS Startup Accelerator, where groundbreaking scientific and technological ideas are churned into products, and pitched for investment. Graffinity's primary product is a smart-search, connection and visualisation tool that processes large amounts of information into graphs, and at the time was in alpha stage of product development, a month away from seeding round.
Graffinity's business and product team are exploring the scope of the tool in journalism and publishing, and are keen to register user interest to measure this. Our task as a team of UX and identity designers is to ​make the platform intuitive, simple and attractive to turn it from a visual curiosity to a functional one.
Project Lead overseeing the design process and strategy, facilitating identification and resolution of knowledge gaps through collaboration. I worked with a team of a UX designer, Graphic Designer, and with the client including Software Developer and Business team.
Understanding the problem
Challenges
Our approach
User needs
Redefined problem
Scoping Opportunity
Information architecture
Wireframing
As a team, we had to decide if we are working on only the UX of the platform or that of the product too. I formed a rough plan with the team to understand the product, our goal and the 'user problem' in detail to make the most out of the 4 weeks.
We began by interviewing stakeholders to leverage information about the product such as its target market, competitors, product scope, interpret user needs and to outline the scope of this collaboration. We also used a brand identity scale to understand what existing brands and values they align with, the motivation behind aesthetic decisions and the meaning behind brand attributes such as the colour Pink.
This allowed us to understand how the client thinks, identify challenges in our way, as well as gain a better understanding of the problem.
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The project scope: Although the product was nearly fully developed, there was insufficient user research and testing leading to assumptions about user groups and the use cases.
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Client's decisions: There was inertia within the client's team to the incorporating user centred and evidence-based design. They were somewhat biased towards their own ideas of Branding and Interface Design, and had a set idea of outcome.
For a UI/UX makeover, we had a week each for problem identification and definition, scoping opportunities and mapping concepts, wire framing and prototyping. Therefore, we had limited time on our hands to conduct user research and testing of the product so we proceeded to focus on uncovering user insights about the platform's experience.
I organised a sprint among the design team to individually identify opportunities for improvement in the website, and held a discussion afterwards. We identified some key UX flaws which we validated through a rapid user testing.
We had two types of user needs to work with:
1. User insights about the product, which was interpreted through stakeholder interviews and containing knowledge gaps.
2. User insights about the websites acquired through testing.
"I'm not sure about how to use this platform and what I can get done. "
"How do I register interest?"
Based on these painpoints, we reframed our problem as:
​How might Graffinity hint to its potential users, the use and functions of the EdTech product so that they register their interest successfully?
Competitor analysis helped us identify opportunities and underlining information strategy.
Visualising design concepts, communicating ideas and testing desirability of features through Wireframing and Lo-Fi prototyping
