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Project Overview

Community of Guardian believes that everyone has the potential to make a meaningful impact on the planet. Therefore, CoG’s main vision is towards cultivating a community of empowered and educated individuals to combat global crises.

By harnessing the collective power of passionate knowledge experts, the blueprint for 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)- from the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by United Nations Member States in 2015, are being tackled at CoG. Aiding the User Centered approach, there were certain factors that needed to be addressed while going through the redesign process:

User Needs

Community Engagement: Connection with like-minded individuals.

Education & Awareness: Access to resources on global crises

Actionable Opportunities: Direct involvement options (Challenges)

Feedback & Recognition: Acknowledgment for contributions (Point and Reward System)

Business Needs

Raising brand awareness: Attract and retain a diverse user base

Scalability: Becoming a cohesive online research inventory to combat global crisis

Sustainability: Establish long-term impact and relevance

Innovation: Continuously improve features and offerings to meet evolving needs

Credits

Duration

4 Months

Team

Group of 10

Role

Product Designer

Software

Figma

Miro

Photoshop

Microsoft 365 Suites

Google Survey

Optimal Workshop

usertesting.com

Devices

Desktop

About CoG

Everyone has the potential to make a meaningful impact on the planet. Therefore, CoG’s main vision is towards cultivating a community of empowered and educated individuals to combat global crises.

Problem Statement

The platform looks outdated and not welcoming enough to attract new end- users

Gamifying CoG to better engage users on various challenges aligned with SDG’s values

Incorporating a point system to encourage frequent users become loyal members

Process

Having an end- to- end design approach

Discover

Market Research

Field User Research

Competitive Analysis

Define

Primary User

Storyboard

Develop

User Flow

Site Map

Design & Test

Wireframes

Mood Board

Branding & Design

Usability Testing

Design Workshop

Deliver

High-Fi Prototype

Mockups

Discover

Reevaluating current SDG values and audience through Research

Market Research

Field User Research

Competitive Analysis

Market Research

47 individuals as my research audience

80% were youths between the age of 15- 25

90.6% were aware of the 17 SDGs

95.7% supported the Student Research Repository (SRR) idea

88.9% were favoring having a rewards and challenge section along with publications

87.7% supported a non-peer reviewed SRR

63.4% of the participants were supportive of a Subscription Service to the inventory

50% were willing to pay a Fee of <$50 in Exchange for Publishing

Field User Research

To better understand our audience and users we decided to have a field study, get out of our analytics, watch and learn.

Studying users in context was also aligned with our survey results, once again it confirmed that our target audience will be majorly youth population.

A super exciting twist however was that our older population would be massively interested in the community if we emphasize on the marketing aspects of the Rewards & Point System benefits for our users.

“I love what your team are doing and standing for, am personally passionate for sustainability and adding the point system perk to the whole idea makes it more exciting “

“I’m not super tech savvy but once you guys get into the local gazette I’ll check on the Challenges and Rewards system”

“This idea sounds really interesting I can’t wait for your relaunch, saving the QR code already!”

“ I am always making sure the oil are not directly drained from the kitchen sink. ( Referring to one of the challenges) “

Competitive Analysis

In order to get more insights on both the “Design” and “Market Research”, 16 NGOs including the United Nations have been going through analysis under multiple factors- from covering the news and research articles to providing a profile page within the platform for the users. As this work was mainly a relaunch, the “Community of Gradians” platform has been part of the analysis as well. The features, and work flows derived from this research helped me understand how to design a responsive platform and to learn what are the candidate features that would enhance the user experience within the new launch.

Major Takeaways:

Running multiple sessions of surveys and interviews along with in person conversations and now our competitive analysis confirms in adding “Challenges” and “Points& Rewards” options within our relaunch to help more users be involved in the cause! To better stand out in the market the combination of using the UN’s basic icons and coming up with our unique design system could be our way to go. Coming up with a cohesive library for scientific articles can help us be more stable within the competitive market while grabbing more attention from the knowledge experts.

Picture Representing Competitive Analysis

Define

Define the target user’s needs, goals, motivations and frustrations based on research finding

Primary User

Storyboard

Primary User

All the evidence from the research phase indicates that: “ The primary user group is youths with a tight budget and busy life style who are looking for affordable and sustainable communities to not only learn from updated publications and participating in collaborative challenges but also are willing to pay within the 50$ budget for a monthly subscription .“

Storyboard

Following along with the CEO’s journey, directly guides us to every user’s story. Inspired by how our diverse team in CoG from different path of life can make a difference together and build a community for a better cause, I decided to merge our user’s story board with the creators and eventually the final story board came into life.

What outcomes do we want to see?

Empowering community and educated individuals

Coming up with a cohesive library for scientific articles can help us be more stable within the competitive market while grabbing more attention from the knowledge experts.

Accessibility for all age groups

Running multiple sessions of surveys and interviews along with in person conversations and now our competitive analysis confirm in adding “Challenges” and “Points& Rewards” options within our relaunch to help more users from all age ranges be involved in the cause!

Minimal and polished outlook

To better stand out in the market, the combination of using the UN’s basic icons and coming up with our unique and minimal design system could be our way to go.

Customization

Having a designated page for user’s “Profile Account” will improve the categorizing experience and having a better access to features presented on CoG; therefore, including a dashboard for the profiles would facilitate the process.

Develop

Develop concepts for potential solutions based on research insight

User Flow

Site Map

User Flow

As the main goal is to build a community while trying to educate your circle and get new insights to help on the global crises, coming up with a user flow to gather both the new users and loyal members together was a vital step. It mainly helped the team to:

Identify the key screens and actions users might require to get into their SDG groups

Get in more details on each group, both from the Challenge section perspective and the Scientific Review section within the SDG pages

Facilitate the navigation flow through user’s Profile Account Dashboard

Site Map

Running several card sorting sessions through Miro, helped the updated categories of CoG develop and get finalized.

Design & Test

Implement the visual design and revise the prototype based on usability testing

Wireframe

Moodboard

Branding & Design

Usability Testing

Design Workshop

Paper Wireframing (Low- Fi)

The approach at CoG is building a gamified learning environment and better showcasing the visual hierarchy, once again I started with sketching the low-fidelity wireframes to structure the key screens for a responsive platform empowering our target audience and strengthening the sense of community among users.

Mood Board

CoG’s main goal is to build a sustainable future, cultivated by the united voice and action of humanity. Their aim is embracing hope while having a formal and authentic voice. I made sure the authenticity and hopefulness are being transferred within the responsive platform.

Branding & Design

One of the main issues we were facing from the beginning of the redesign process with CoG was not having a rich inventory as our Design System and it made communicating with the development team tedious and inefficient. To better categorize the colors, typography, dimension of the icons, CTAs and input fields, borders, gradients and overlays and to share components effectively we not only aid from having a documented design system but also made sure all the components( from different cards to images) are being addressed within the asset section in our Figma file.

Communicating with the development team CoG

Usability Testing

Aiding a mixed research approach (quantitative and qualitative), led to rapid unmoderated usability test rounds on the redesign prototype of CoG utilizing Hotjar.

I specifically tested a flow where users are going through a personality quiz or navigating within their SDG page. Users were required to navigate within the platform, take the personality quiz and successfully get into their SDG page and customize it. Some of the highlights of the results are as follows:

All users were able to take the survey and complete all tasks.

30% of users didn't know how to navigate within their “Profile Account” and customize their dashboard.

All users expressed positive sentiment towards the experience.

Design Workshop

Going through a design thinking workshop with our product team helped us reassure our empathy for the target audience and once again facilitated reiteration process on the existing prototype.

Deliver

Deliver the final prototype

High- Fi Prototype

Mockups

High-Fi Prototype

Through this journey we were able to uncover more information from our users regarding their preferences with CoG and also were able to come up with a prototype that went through multiple rounds of iteration. As the CoG is constantly evolving, we observed favorable results and suggest more testing with other flows to further understand how our solution fits user needs.

To save the IP and novelty of CoG’s journal papers I made sure that the represented prototypes are generic knowledge that could be shared with the public.

Reflection & Next Steps

The start of this project was with the hopes of gathering like-minded people to combat global crisis and advocate 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. However, it turned into an interactive hub connecting users through various challenges and offering rewards and point system to loyal members.

Within the current scope, a number of tasks have been paused or need to be investigated and addressed further:

Cover broader age range

Based on our Field studies more information about the target user is needed to ensure we are getting data points from the right users and to better cover all age ranges and not just youths. This can help give our data more confidence.

Gather actionable insights

Unmoderated usability testing cannot provide the rich data that moderated sessions can. I recommend following up with this to ensure building a larger database.

Address the audience inclusively

Most users that were recruited were more technically savvy than others. This test does not equally capture pain points from all users which were a documented target user group for CoG.