The Factory
It is a unit of experimental projects for students and faculty.
It manages IADE's special projects by organizing interdisciplinary dynamics
that allow projects to materialize and then to be projected out of IADE.
Role:
UX Designer
(part of a UX team of 5)
Client:
IADE University
Year:
2018
the challenge
Making its essence and purpose visible to users, either companies and students, was the real challenge regarding this pro-bono project.
In fact, because it is an innovative platform, the challenge was to show its added value for students and companies to establish a greater relationship.
The goals
The main goal of this unit of experimental projects for students and faculty was to design a platform capable of organizing extracurricular challenges, supporting curricular and/or experimental projects, based on partnerships with the market and society civil.
My Role
The factory project has always focused on encouraging students with the industry and vice versa.
In this way, an invitation was addressed to some students from different undergraduate courses and master's degrees, so that, together, they could be part of the genesis of this project, contributing with their own needs in the portal’s design and information architecture.
In my case, as a student of the Master's degree in Interaction Design at IADE University, my participation took into account the initial phase of the project namely:
interviews with students and professors, industry professionals;
Analysis of interview and gathering the insights regarding key requirements that should appear on the platform (through card-sorting);
Initial UX assessments and usability tests were also carried out on the first drafts, with a consequent improvement (mockup iteration) until reaching a final version.
Personas
Based on the initial target and in the results of our evaluation, it was suggested that there were different types of users with diverse needs.
It was essential to understand who those people were, so we could validate if our solutions were indeed useful for them and beneficial for the platform.
Initially, 4 profiles were created (Student, Teacher, HR Recruiter, and Business Manager) however, each of these was divided into 2, making a total of 8 personas.
This happened because it was evident, through the interview process, that there were different and specific needs within each of the groups.
Card-Sorting & Information Architecture
After the completion of the first draft of the IA, a card-sorting exercise was carried out with students from several undergraduate and graduate courses as well as with professors and the university’s HR Recruiters, to understand whether all the requirements and insights found in the interviews were being well addressed.
When observing the results, it was evident that there were behavioural patterns that were replicated and perceived in the same way by all participants. These were taken into consideration in the design process.
My participation covers only the following topics: Interviews with stakeholders, defining personas, obtaining insights and information architecture.
The subsequent elaboration of low and medium fidelity prototypes was done by the team that remained in the project. The next mockups are shown here for context purposes.
