The Challenge
Over the course of a 7 week sprint: I designed for, developed, and launched the website for Colossal Work, a DEI firm focused on utilizing the power of marketing to advance equity within the workplace.
Process
To ensure that I approached the problem from a holistic standpoint, I utilized a 5 step problem-solving process that allowed me to move forward strategically. I repeated steps 3-5 to polish the product.
Empathize: During this step, I put myself in the user's shoes to understand their current journey, thoughts, actions, motivations, and any points of contention.
Define: Here, my goal is to clarify problems that need to be solved and the goals / KPI's that ned to be achieved.
Ideate: In this step, I outline potential solutions to the problems defined in the previous step using clever visual design, proper UX strategy, and data-informed decision-making.
Prototype: Here, I bring solutions to life through thoughtful interaction design. It's important to remain as detailed as possible when prototyping to remove any ambiguity during development.
Test: Collecting real data on the effectiveness of your decisions is paramount to continuously improving your strategy and refining the product. Therefore, I repeated steps 3-5 as often as time allows.
Research & Discovery (Weeks 1 & 2)
Tools used:
User interviews
Competitive analysis
I received a research and discovery deck with brand personas, a purpose statement, and three key qualities of the persona. However, I wanted a holistic understanding of the user. I asked the client to gather as many early adopters as possible for user interviews within a week. In the end, I conducted three user interviews with marketing leaders to understand who we're designing for and why they chose Colossal Work.
My assumptions:
CW's audience is highly morals based.
“Mission is important to me. I want to be aligned with you more than anything else.”
"I cannot stress enough how important I think it is to educate the workplace on matters of equity and inclusion. That's why I work with them.”
Competitive analysis: Getting the big picture
In conjunction with interviews, I decided to perform a heuristic analysis against our largest direct competitors to assess what conventions our audience is used to interacting with and to draw inspiration from their strengths. I consulted Nielsen Norman Group's 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design and chose the heuristics that I felt were most closely aligned with the interviewees' ideals.
Synthesis (Week 3)
Tools used:
User persona
Empathy map
User stories
Sitemap
A primary persona emerged as a culmination of my research, which informed my design decisions moving forward, Gabriel is the Head of Marketing for a mid-sized brand. Gabriel has about 15 years of marketing experience, and seven years in senior leadership roles. Gabriel manages a team of forty people, that is not very diverse. Gabriel supplements his team with agency partners for advertising, creative, and copywriting.
Meet Gabriel.
Biography
Gabriel Ocampo is a highly motivated and conscientious marketing leader dedicated to driving inclusive and ethical marketing practices within their organization.With a strong belief in the transformative power of inclusive representation in media and marketing, Gabriel is a passionate advocate for creating a more equitable and diverse workplace.
Goals
Contribute to a company culture that values, celebrates, and elevates equity and inclusion.
Eventually, become a board member to champion DEI at a higher level.
Motivations
Belief in the competitive advantage that comes with inclusive practices.
Personal experiences that show the need for representation and inclusion.
Pain points
Addressing systemic biases and prejudices within the workplace.
Lack of diversity in upper management and decision-making roles within the company.
Slow progress in implementing DEI initiatives due to resistance from some stakeholders.
Balancing the desire for rapid change with the need to build consensus and support among colleagues.
Managing the emotional toll of advocating for DEI issues while facing resistance or indifference from others.
Needs
Support and buy-in from company leadership to drive DEI initiatives forward.
Ongoing education and training to stay up-to-date on best practices in DEI marketing.
A team of like-minded professionals who share their passion for inclusive marketing practices.
Empathy Mapping: Tying it all together
Once my audience and their needs had been established, it was time to synthesize the findings into an empathy map. Along with the persona, these documents serve of truth for my user's thoughts, feelings, speech, actions, what sentiments they might hear and see, and their goals and pitfalls alike. The overarching themes for each were as follows:
Major preoccupations/worries and aspirations:
Feelings of anxiety about limited a limited supply of time and a growing demand for capital.
How our users speak and appear to others:
The contradiction of preaching a frugal lifestyle and practicing one outside of their means.
What our users see in their environments & communities:
Reminders of their goals and potential avenues to reach them.
What our users hear in their environments and communities:
Compassionate and distressed opinions of the next steps to take.
Our users' fears, frustrations, and obstacles:
Gaps in knowledge that are difficult to fill because of a lack of time.
Our users wants, needs, and measures of success:
An increase in time to spend with loved ones and capital to fund aspirations.
User Stories
I then developed user stories based on the wants/needs of our persona. This helped me stay aligned with our target audience. The user stories acted as a makeshift "checklist" that I kept on hand when ideating.
Sitemap
With a user-validated feature set to build and a robust understanding of who I was building for, I developed a sitemap. Based on the copy provided, I outlined the architecture of the site and how the pages interact and link to each other.
Ideation (Week 4)
Tools used:
Figma
Now that I had the structure of the site developed, target audience defined, and a landing page to use as inspiration, it was time to begin designing. Due to time constraints, I immediately began designing in high-fidelity, using the copy provided to structure the content of the page. Additionally, I worked with Colossal Work's graphic designer to ensure brand alignment across all pages.
The design that was provided to me
This is the initial mockup created by the designer prior to me taking over the project. The client had feedback to be implemented before development, including:
Put a larger emphasis on methods instead of previous clients since they're a growing company.
Expand the navigation to encompass all of the information necessary to communicate.
Remove data that isn't immediately relevant to CW's mission and purpose.
The buttons and image boxes feel too unrelated, make the image and button shape more similar.
What I designed based on stakeholder feedback of the above:
This is the result of the above feedback. The homepage metrics in the original were replaced with more relevant information and the structure of text-areas were slightly changed. Once I confirmed the client was satisfied, I began the development phase.
Development & Testing (Weeks 5-7)
Tools used:
Figma
Framer
VSCode
I prepared CW's design for development by first prepping the development environment to seamlessly accommodate CW's design language while dynamically rendering styles across different breakpoints. I first started by importing color and text styles into my development tool of choice, Framer.
I then imported components using the "Figma to HTML with Framer" plugin available on Figma and ensured that the design is responsive across all breakpoints. For all of my contracted work, I use 5 responsive breakpoints. Additionally, this is where any micro-interactions and animations are added. I used this time to create a "back-to-top" button. This could have easily been recreated in Framer but my first thought was to utilize a button from a previous project as I had hard-coded it myself before I fully understood Framer's capabilities.
Testing
With this, the site was developed into a working prototype and tested against as many participants as the client could gather within 2 weeks. In the end, the prototype was tested against 3 new participants.
Participants were asked to complete 3 tasks based on the user stories established earlier:
Image you're interacting with the Colossal Work brand and web presence for the first time. Locate the purpose statement and show me how you would go about submitting an inquiry from there.
You'd now like to understand how CW promotes diversity among marketing teams. Locate either report titled "Marketing's role in creating an equitable future".
Finally, you're interested in the research that's been performed. Locate "handpicked resources".
Now validated, the product was nearing launch and I could confirm that the result was intuitive and posed little resistance to the user. Upon finishing the usability tests, the client had requested a few last minute changes:
After sitting with the design, the client preferred the button radius and shape in the original.
The radius on images was too bold. The client asked that I make it more subtle.
The final result
With that, Colossal Work was launched to an immediate audience of over 4,000 DEI and marketing enthusiasts and aficionados. I'm responsible for the ongoing maintenance, design, and development of the site under my design studio, GRYM.