Case Study:

Design Pro
Site Design

Google UX Design Certification Project

Project Overview

DesignPro® is a design site serving entrepreneurs, novice and expert designers, and businesses. It’s the platform to design from scratch or get inspired by a professionally designed template, to create anything from videos to presentations. It also offers video tutorials and online courses for designers at all levels.

Problem

Hard to find easy-to-use, web-based tools to design a variety of content for someone at any level of expertise.

My Role

UX designer designing the site from conception to delivery.

Goal

Provide users at any level of expertise a website to create, share designs, and learn in real time how to design a variety of engaging content.

Responsibilties

Conducting interviews, paper and digital wireframing, low and high-fidelity prototyping, conducting usability studies, accounting for accessibility, and iterating on designs.

Understanding the User

User Personas

HR Business Partner and Free-lance Photographer | Miami, FL

Pam

Pam has been an HR professional for 20 years and also owns an engagement/wedding photography business. As a fully virtual HR Business Partner and people leader, Pam knows that her job involves spending a lot of time meeting with employees, so most days she doesn’t have time during her workday to focus on her photography business. Pam needs a tool that is easy to use to create marketing assets for her business.

Program Manager | Cary, North Carolina

Leon

Leon is a Program Manager at a Tech start up. As a program manager at small organization he wears many hats and needs to design content for his progam but has limited experience with design. He needs an affordable online tool thats easy to use to create courses, videos, job aids, and presentations. He also wants it to provide training to develop his design skills because he really enjoys this part of his role.

User Research
Summary

I conducted user interviews, which I then turned into empathy maps to better understand the target user and their needs. I discovered that many target users enjoy designing to tap into their creative side. However, many design software are overwhelming and confusing to navigate, which frustrated many target users. This caused a normally enjoyable experience to become challenging for them, deterring them from designing.

Pain Points

1

Time

Users are too busy to spend time at a desktop to learn, they need template options to design quickly

2

Knowledge

Users want to learn how to design a variety of content but don’t know where to start

3

Accessibility

Design tools/platforms for consuming learning are not equipped with assistive technologies

The Design

Paper Wireframes

Next, I sketched out paper wireframes for each screen for the mobile version, keeping the user pain points about navigation, browsing, and checkout flow in mind.

The home screen paper wireframe variations to the right focus on optimizing the browsing experience for users.

Digital Wireframes

Moving from paper to digital wireframes made it easy to understand how the redesign could help address user pain points and improve the user experience. Prioritizing an easy navigation menu at the top.

Homepage is optimized for easy browsing through the carousel of images and nav menu options

Easy to access all design options

Usability
Study: findings

1 / Options

Users need a clear definition of each of their options to design or learn

2 / Export

Users didn’t know what the best export option was for their content

3 / Templates

Users wanted templates for each type of content organized by purpose of useeatures to connect to collaegues

Mockups

Going Forward

Takeaways

Impact

Our target users shared that the design was intuitive to navigate through, more engaging with the images, and demonstrated a clear visual hierarchy.

What I learned

I learned that even a small design change can have a huge impact on the user experience. The most important takeaway for me is to always focus on the real needs of the user when coming up with design ideas and solutions.

Next Steps

Conduct follow-up usability testing on the new website

Identify any additional areas of need and ideate on new features

Expand the interactions on the site to cover every user flow.

Let's
Connect!

Thank you for your time reviewing my work on this app design! If you’d like to see more or get in touch, my contact information is provided below.

Design Pro Site Design