Desnignify: Daily design challenges for designers
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
16 hour hackathon
Team
Product Manager
Product Designer
About Davis Design Festival
Davis Design Fest is a 1-day hackathon hosted by Design Interactive, a student design organization.
Design is ever-changing and evolving. With the dynamic nature of the industry, designers find themselves navigating a constant stream of new trends and technologies, often struggling to stay ahead with career expectations.
CHALLENGE
Design a mobile or desktop application that seamlessly integrates with individuals’ daily lives to promote education and career development.
Submission overview
Daily practice has significant benefits for education, skill acquisition, and application of those skills. This is evident in the design of products that promote daily activity and recurring challenges, such as LeetCode, Duolingo, and Quizlet, popular platforms centered around education and the development/refinement of knowledge and skills.
Using this as our guiding principle for our product within the scope of career development for designers led to the development of three key features for Designify: Daily design prompts, community feedback design, and profile & portfolio development.
Provided user personas
The provided user insights underscores a unified need for a solution that addresses feedback mechanisms, mentorship opportunities, personalized skill development, and networking facilitation.
To narrow the initial scope of our product, we chose to focus on the underlying theme between these needs, learning. Leveraging our access to a community full of our core target audience of aspiring designers, we were able to synthesize real and relevant context into shaping our design decisions, namely the prioritization of features and design choices that are both relevant and responsive to their needs.
Specifically, the integration of profile & portfolio development directly addresses the challenges voiced by early-career/aspiring designers in our community, who often struggle to effectively showcase their work and stand out in a competitive job market. More often than not, early-career designers are more than capable of meeting the requirements for the positions they are seeking, but are completely overlooked in their applications simply due to a lack of projects to show, or overall saturation of applications.
Designify wireframes
Within 16 hours, I wireframed some initial feature ideas.
Navigation and projects page
The sidebar navigation opts for a dashboard-like experience, rather than a website experience. Just as platforms such as Duolingo, LeetCode, and even Khan Academy provide a contained experience for learning, I wanted to build something similar for Designify.
The projects page spotlights the daily design challenge, providing easy access to Designify's main feature. The projects page also contains other long-term projects for Designify users to work on.
Daily design challenge submission
When entering the daily design challenge submission page, a summary of the project pops up. Upon submission, users are navigated to a preview of their submission before officially publishing to Designify's public forums.
Public forum
We wanted Designify to play a role in fostering a design community. Platforms like Behance and Dribble are platforms to view and display work, but Designify creates a space for designers to actively share and receive feedback. After posting, users can view and provide feedback on each other's submissions to the daily design challenge.
Past challenges
Gallery contains top submissions for previous design challenges, so that users can reference and gain inspiration from old submissions if they choose to do so.
Personal profile
Similar to Behance and Dribble, designers can cultivate a porfolio on Designify. This incentivizes designers to complete design challenges, and creates another space for designers to represent their work. The profile is customizable with social links and other relevant descriptions.
