Studio Sync
In 2016, I was starting to feel creatively isolated after having moved to Atlanta two years prior. That fall, I enrolled in the User Experience Design Immersive at General Assembly and was suddenly surrounded by a group of designers eager to learn from each other and make work. The experience got me thinking about how creative professionals might find each other more easily and collaborate on projects together.
- What I did: UI Design, UX Design, User Research, Wireframing, High Fidelity Mockups
- Client: General Assembly / Personal Project
- Timeline: 8 weeks
Problem
Creative professionals who have moved to a new city might have trouble tapping into the art scene around them because they don’t know where to look for nearby events or established organizations.
Solution
Studio Sync was a conceptual social media platform with the goal of facilitating collaboration between users. In creating the project, I wanted learn how the platform might help users find each other and establish meaningful connections that would enrich their work.
Networking over collaboration
For research, I interviewed five creative professionals in fields ranging from graphic design to education. The discussions were illuminating and, unsurprisingly, invalidated a few of the assumptions I had made during the ideation phase. I learned that:
Because their work and its realization was deeply personal to my interviewees, collaboration was rarely their first instinct when starting a new project. However, they still wanted to be able to find people who could help with specific skills they lacked when necessary.
Despite preferring to work alone for the most part, the people I interviewed saw the potential value of Studio Sync as a tool that could help them build a personal community based on their creative work and interests.
Collaboration should be based on what is best for the project and the creator.
James D. - Educator, Sculptor, Digital Artist
Giving users what they want
My biggest takeaway from the interviews was that I needed to pivot. What I had originally intended to be a collaborative platform was changing into a networking one to better provide what my target audience wanted most.
Insight
Action
Making mistakes with sketches
Class feedback on my initial sketches revealed that the profile page didn’t exactly encourage communication since users could only message each other after connecting. This put a lot of pressure on the user to send a "cold" request to connect before being able to get to know another user. To solve this, I added a Message button alongside a Connect button to the profile page which made it easier to casually strike up a conversation.
While my classmates liked the calendar styling, they felt that the Events page risked becoming visually cluttered if there were too many events to display. I scrapped the calendar layout for a more simplified, scannable list instead. If it was easier for users to find events, it could be easier for them to meet others with similar interests.
My original sketch for the homepage presented the user with the four main search methods. In the subsequent iteration, I eliminated the “find by skills” option after the user interviews helped me determine that it might not be the most appealing way to find collaborators. Additionally, interviewees didn’t think that particular search method would be one they took advantage of since “skill gaps” weren’t something they dealt with often.
Creating visual consistency
To build recognizable layouts across multiple pages and give users a consistent visual experience, I used the same structural elements for pages that had similar functions. This tightened up the overall look of the site and allowed me to implement several UI patterns.
Profile pages for users, events, and groups
Sidebar + Main Content pages for a user’s connections and messages
Info cards for aggregate list pages
To mirror the way the Profile page was designed, I added Join and RSVP buttons in the headers of the Event and Group page, respectively. Paired with a Notifications button, users could now keep up with groups and events they were interested in.
On the Profile page, I opted for a section of interactive pill tags to feature a user’s skills. Clicking on the tags would generate a filtered list of users with the same skill - another potential path to discover others with interesting capabilities.
Finally, one of the main critiques I received from the class about my designs was that the homepage consisted only of the three search methods, which created a shallow user experience. Taking a cue from other social media platforms, I added a feed of user generated content to instill the homepage with a sense of discovery. Showcasing recent user, group, and event activity provided users with more opportunities to find others with similar interests and relieved the pressure of manually searching for those same connections.
Conclusions and Takeaways
So many lessons were learned with my first end-to-end UX project. I learned how pivotal it was to validate design decisions based on user research and feedback. I also learned how easy it was for my own biases to creep in and influence my work.
If I were to continue the project in the future, I’d like to build out and test the usability of the Classifieds section since I placed that feature on the back-burner as a nice-to-have. I would also test which search method garnered the most use on the platform to see if I could improve how users found collaborators, groups, and events.
There were plenty of times I was unsure about the design of Studio Sync, but a quote from one of my users inspired me to keep pushing through each iteration of the project:
“Crank out the work. Don’t be precious about it”
Beau B. - Graphic Designer, Illustrator, Philanthropist
