Ripe
A social platform that connects older professionals to its peers about UX Design
Adobe Creative Jam x General Assembly's design challenge was to create a third party mobile app for underrepresented creatives to have access to a community to thrive in and help empower them. Teams had 72 hours to submit a high-fidelity prototype.
Team: 2 UX Designers
Role: Research, Hifi Wireframes, and Protoyping
Tools: Adobe XD
Timeline: Aug 2020 | 72 hours
Many aspiring UX Designers over 40 years old were concerned about their age being a constraint factor in pursuing this profession. UX Design has been known to be a profession for career changers, yet, it's still widely known as an industry for millenials.
Ripe is a concept social community app that connects older professionals to its peers about UX Design. Its content and features contains discussions, career resources, and networking events. By fostering a sense of community and showing older UX designers as an underrepresented sector to the larger public, we hope that Ripe will break the stigma of ageism in the UX industry.
Go to Final DesignsI went on to research ageism in the tech industry to see if this was still a relevant issue for the past 3 years. I found out that for the 2019 Design Census, 75% of designers were in their 20s-30s and the median age being 35 years old. I did learn that UX Designers in the 40-60s age range are not prevalent in the tech industry.
I needed to find more evidence on my users and decide to research on popular public community forums like Reddit and Quora because they are a great way to ask questions anonymously and get unbiased advice. I found that many older aspiring UX Designers were concerned about their age being a constraint factor in pursuing this profession compared to being worried about their work experience.
Based on my research findings, I created Anita Baker who will be our heroine in this case study. I did not identify with this user group so I made a persona to increase my empathy level and always made sure my bias did not get in the way of my design decisions.
Groups are important for connecting with other people with similar interests. Ripe's group feature would allow Anita to join different groups related to UX Design. She can also post on specific topics in the forums presented in a card layout and other users can interact with her comment through replying or liking her post.
%402x.png)
%402x.png)
Being able to post a question in the groups section would allow users to get specific answers on his/her needs. I wanted Anita to have the freedom in posting questions related to the group so she could get individual feedback and advices to her situation.
%402x.png)
%402x.png)
Events help to empower people and it was my intention to have Anita learn more about other users' life experiences that are similar to hers. Since Anita did not know any UX Designers that was of similar age to her, I wanted Ripe to host networking events to allow other users to connect with like minded UX Designers.
When choosing a colour palette, I chose to make the visual design to be modern and appealing to show that older users like Anita can also appreciate sleek apps.
View PrototypeDue to the tight deadline of this challenge, I could only do one user testing. I was not able to iterate the changes based on this user testing. However, the purpose of the user testing was to get unbiased feedback and to improve my skills as a designer.
The stock images of the groups could have been more consciously chosen for the app’s demographic since it looks like a young student in the “Bootcamp and Post Graduate Recommendations” group.
User was a bit confused in understanding what the icons represented in the navigation bar. This could have been designed better by having text at the bottom of the icons such as “Home” “Groups”, "Events", etc.
The payment on the networking event could have been more clear if the event needed to be paid on the spot or through credit card as the user was confused as to how to submit the payment after he confirmed his attendance. A text underneath the price should have been added to state the payment instructions.
User was very confused when he entered into the landing page. He was disoriented as the screens were designed for a recurring user instead. Adding onboarding screens would have helped the user understand the features of the app.
User completely missed out the “post a question” feature when entering into the “Transition into UX" group and never saw it until after the testing. I should have added an “+ icon” to allow the user to enter straight into the “post a question” feature on this screen.
103 teams submitted a high fidelity prototype for the design challenge and there were 10 runner ups and 10 finalists. Ripe was part of the 10 runner ups and my group got a prize as a result. You can view the full scores of our app here under the name "Stale Cupcakes".
This project concluded when the contest finished. Since I only had 72 hours to build a high fidelity prototype, I had to consciously choose the design tools that would provide results in a fast and efficient manner. Such as:
01– Choosing to sketch first when visually creating the screens. This was because sketching was fast and allowed me to focus only on layouts and not worry about spacing or colours for the first draft.
02– Skipping low fidelity and going straight to high fidelity wireframes. I felt low fidelity wireframes wouldn’t work for this challenge because I needed to produce fast results and felt I needed the time to tweak my high fidelity wireframes instead.
03– Research wasn't as thorough as we did not conduct surveys, or interviews. In addition, we needed to do at least 4 more user testing to ensure our assumptions were accurate.
If you want to collaborate or talk about design, please feel free to reach out to me :)
