Laura Marin

Overview

This project was a result of a hackathon-style event that my college roommate and I decided to participate in during our senior year. We had 10 days to build out a project that solved for the problem that we were presented and that followed the specs/guidelines that were outlined.

Our project was picked as one of the top 10 finalists out of 400+ teams and we were given the chance to present it to a board of designers who judged the projects and gave us tips on how to improve them. It was an incredibly rewarding process and I learned a lot along the way!

Requirements

– Must be a desktop or web app. The team may design either for any screen size.
– Contain 8 or more unique screens connected together.
– Created during the event time period and not be derived from previously created work.

Discovery

We started off by brainstorming the interests of our potential users.

During our preliminary user research, my teammate and I found that a lot of people, and including ourselves, are always looking for new hobbies to keep our minds busy and we frequently find ourselves jumping from one hobby to another. However, it gets really tedious because we have to rely on Google searches and multiple different sites to really gather the information that we need in order to properly participate in most of these hobbies.

We wanted Inspire to be accessible to everyone regardless of factors such as age, gender, and level of expertise, so we made the decision to create a design based on sites that users are already very comfortable with such as Facebook, Discord, Twitch, and even Tik Tok. By doing this, we hope to reduce the learning curve and instead allow users to just jump in to exploring the content that they want to see.

Persona

We modeled the user persona after one of our friends who participated in our user research, but we also condensed a couple of personas into one for the sake of time. If we were to do this again in the future, we would create more than one persona for content creators, users that simply want to consume content, etc.

Renee is a student who moved to NYC in hopes of connecting to more people to aid her job as an influencer. Her graduate courses are online and she’s currently struggling to juggle the online lectures and coursework along with the multiple different social platforms that she has to keep up with.

Her goal is to be able to reach out to people who share her interests and be able to do so through an array of different mediums such as videos, blog posts, status updates, and even streaming, but she’d love it if she didn’t have to switch between platforms to do so. She also would like to be able to discover new hobbies now that she's in a brand new city, but she doesn't have the time to browse multiple websites to find what she needs.

Planning

Once we had a good idea of what our users would want out of our product, we began planning the basic structure of the website.

We had to keep in mind our deadline, which was approaching quickly, and the minimum requirement of 8 unique screens. We decided to write down the screens that would best demonstrate our product and work on any extras if we had time to spare.

Design

Due to the time constraint, we skipped the low fidelity prototypes and went straight into high fidelity prototyping in Adobe XD. We settled on a theme, which ended it up being a black background with purple as an accent color, and each began designing what we envisioned each page to look like.

This allowed for a few iterations, such as the one below, where we switched out a three column topic page design in favor of separate subpages for each type of media. We believed this would allow users to experience the content to its full extent. We also thought it would prevent them from becoming overwhelmed— The before image shows Live, Recent blog posts, and Global chat all being presented to the user in the same way, which might come across as an overload of information. The updated design shows a page with a main focus, with the addition of a side bar that gives a sneak peak of other content and that can be hidden if the user chooses to do so.

As you can see, our design also offers the user some recommendations for new people that they can connect with. We made it a mix of smaller creators and larger creators because we want to give a voice to those that are underrepresented or that might not have as big of a following yet. That way, we can prevent the space being dominated by the same creators and allow talented, up and coming creators the chance to expand their platforms.

We believe that human connection is a crucial component when it comes to inspiration, so we also wanted to include a live chat feature. This would allow us to foster a safe space where users could connect with others and discuss the topics that they're passionate about.

Laura Marin

Adobe x Twitch Creative Jam – “Inspire”

"Design a third-party desktop app or website that serves as a single-stop resource for any media related to a topic and encourages users to find new interests, events, and communities."

Discovery

Persona

Planning

Check out the full prototype below!