DesignCloud is a co-working space in Chicago specifically aimed at creative professionals. They were looking for improvements to their website to drive member conversions and a solution to manage the overall culture of the community they wanted to foster. My main role as a user experience designer was to conduct user research, outline the user flows, gather content and functional requirements, and create visual designs of the new pages and screens.
The team started off by conducting contextual inquiries with six users, two of which were employees and four of which were members. The questions varied depending on their relationship with DesignCloud. For the employees, we wanted to understand what their vision was for the company and any pain points they had with their current system. The member interviews were to understand what their motivations were behind choose DesignCloud over competitors and if they had any areas of improvement for the space. After we completed the research, we organized the data in a work activity affinity diagram to help categorize the information and identify the key themes based on our research.
I was responsible for putting together work flows to depict DesignCloud's current system so that we could easily identify ways to improve their existing process. We leveraged mental models, sketching, brainstorming sessions to come up with a solution which we based our task, contextual, and interaction models on. These sessions led us to create lo-fi wireframes to help drive the layout for the design phases.
Ultimately, I designed visual comps for a desktop and a responsive mobile view of their current website.
These are the desktop and mobile versions of the member intranet that our team designed. I created these visual comps in Photoshop and Illustrator from the wireframes that I had received, also keeping in mind the requirements and information architecture that we had established. I also created prototypes for the desktop and mobile views using InvisionApp.
OUTCOME: Our team presented our research, design decisions / strategy, visual comps, and prototypes to DesignCloud. Nick, the founder, told us that we had exceeded his expectations for this project. He and the DesignCloud team are currently taking a look at the recommendations we made and incorporating them into their existing systems.