Work
Case Studies
Team members:
Autumn Valjien (NYC): Lead Define & Prototyping
Judi Rhee Alloway (PHL): Lead Empathize
Sutherland Carter (DAL): Lead Ideate & Prototyping
Keywords:
Mobile App, Mobile Design, Mood Board, Survey, Research, Interviews, Contextual Inquiries, Competitive Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Feature Analysis, Problem Statement, Solution Statement, Task Analysis, Feature Prioritization, Design Studio, Wireframe, Interaction Design, Visual Design, Prototype, Usability Testing, Scripts, A/B Testing, Coaching, Project Management, Time Constraints, Presentation
Plot Twist: Discovering a New Market ~ Secondary Persona becomes Primary
Working with my Dream Team creative, empathetic and talented designers, Autumn and Sutherland, our project started with the inkling of an idea ~ LinkedIn for Artists: 1 feature for a mobile app within a 2 week sprint.
It was such an innovative idea to create portfolios for creatives!
With daily standups at 12pm, 4pm, and 9pm EST, after every stand up I wrote up team notes on Slack and our next steps to keep our team on pace.
Starting with my research and editing of our feature proposal, I discovered an untapped market of 244.2 million hidden American artists (81.4% of the pre-Census population).
Leading Empathize and Testing, I wrote Screener questionnaire, interview scripts, synthesized Competitive and Comparative Analysis for Task Analysis and Feature Prioritization, and Usability Testing, scripts, SUS Scale, and Presentation with memes and videos.
In Competitive and Comparative Analysis during Empathize, I found out that 88.24% of our 17 surveys preferred Instagram as their top choice to showcase their arts. Yet 70.59% would be willing to change from Instagram to another brand. There was a huge market opportunity!
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Making LinkedIn More Inclusive for an Untapped Market
Despite my market share revelation, we had a major plot twist with our personas and user flows. According to my market research and stats, there were 244.2 million hidden American artists that didn’t have a profile on LinkedIn, our primary persona Juliet.
LinkedIn’s vision is to “create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.” Yet Juliet didn’t feel included on LinkedIn due to the LinkedIn brand blue more “corporate” image with “conservative views to swallow.”
How can we make LinkedIn more inclusive for a large untapped market?
When our 17 survey results, 10 interviews and 3 contextual inquiries came back, we had assumed wrong that the non-included new user, Juliet was our primary persona. It turns out that our secondary persona (the current user, Kian) who already had a current LinkedIn profile ~ but without their portfolio listed ~ was indeed our primary persona by the numbers.
Most users did already use LinkedIn, but not a full picture of their career without portfolios, often mis-nuanced recommended jobs and unable to network in their artistic industry (categories of artists).
And as much as they loved Instagram, they felt that they couldn’t list the breadth of their portfolio only pictures and videos, find job opportunities and network.
Our secondary persona Kian became our primary persona. With that information, I changed our feature prioritization for the current user instead of the new user. Autumn who led Define also switched Kian’s user flow with Juliet’s with extensive user flow onboarding.
A/B Testing & Toggle Struggle is Real
Unfortunately in the middle of the project, my Mom tested positive for COVID-19, while I fell sick with a 2 week fever/chills and very bad sore throat.
Feeling like it was hard to get out of bed, it was challenging to get my energy up by the time we were wireframing and prototyping.
Since the Kian’s user flow had changed to primary persona, Sutherland led Ideate and our 2 Design Studios as we decided to break our wireframe into 3 parts: Beginning, Middle, and End. I wireframed the Beginning, Autumn drove the engine of the Middle with portfolio creation, and Sutherland finished it with our success message to going Public.
We all prototyped our part of the first flow before we started user testing, which I led by writing usability testing processes, scripts and templates, calculating SUS scale. Both Autumn and Sutherland led Prototyping. Sutherland made a design system and worked on rectifying that LinkedIn mobile wasn’t designed on a grid, Autumn collected our inconsistent design choices, and I tested with users our design choices with 3 A/B testing with 1 inconclusive A/B test on toggles.
We had 4+ different versions of toggles including colors: ON vs OFF, Private vs Public, with labeling within toggles, or the top of toggles.
Prototyping & More Testing our 5th Final Flow
There were no overwhelming conclusive usability testing results about toggles. We were stuck in a toggle limbo. With more time and testing more than 10 participants, we could have resolved the toggle issue.
While Sutherland and Autumn finished the 5th version of our prototype integrating all of the usability testing design changes, I worked on our LinkedIn for Artists presentation integrating pinks, greens, and yellows of our design and their brand.
We practiced our 20 minute presentation 5 times and felt very confident. Since we were only supposed to create a feature within an app, our instructors were less than thrilled with our app within an app. Our classmates thought it was a great and useful idea from research to prototype. Our 10 testers gave us a 78.75 B as an overall SUS Scale.
Most importantly we came together as a team, learned about a real market need, and were courageous enough to create a mobile app within an app going above and beyond a feature within 2 weeks! Also I’m often the leader of so much supporting communities, it was such a gift to be supported by my teammates. It was quite an adventure!
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