CoForce App- Final project at Ironhack Berlin
Case study of how I collaborated with a young innovative startup
In June 2019 I joined a UX/UI design bootcamp in a tech school called Ironhack Berlin. During the bootcamp, I did 7 projects that cover the whole design thinking process, from user research to high fidelity prototype, while keeping the user’s needs always at the center of the design.
This is the case study of my Final project.
Who are CoForce?
As the end of the bootcamp was approaching, Ironhack gave us, the students a chance to collaborate with real companies/start-ups for our last final project.
CoForce was among them and the one I choose to work with. They were a young passionate start-up based in Berlin. They came to us with the idea for a platform that will match the right people together based on a mutual passion so they can team up to build a core team that will lead innovative start-ups or core teams that will run and manage social responsibility challenges/activities. The whole idea is based on the concept that without a passion that is common to the team members — the team won’t be able to fully push each other to reach the goals that have been set and eventually change the status quo.
“Passion drives people to work with an intense desire to solve a specific challenge because they care. We believe this creates sustainable innovative solutions that contribute to making the world a better place” CoForce.
First thing first — Meeting with the stakeholders
For this project, I teamed up with Jay. We had less than two weeks to deliver an MVP of the app. Both of us were involved in the UX and the UI of the project. The first thing we did was to meet our stakeholders that we’re gonna work with for the next two weeks. We spend many hours with them at the beginning of the first week trying to fully understand their business goals and requirements.
The Key requirements summary:
• Mobile App MVP
• Clean interface, not too colorful
• As few buttons and menus as possible
• Match-making process based on passion, skillset, and personality (set by a trustworthy personality test).
These guys are very ambitious, they had 6 problems they wanted to tackle. The problem with the problem statements they had: all of them together were covering too many pain points and different user groups, something that is impossible to solve in a two-week project.
As we learned during the course, when we follow the design thinking process, we can’t solve all the problems for everyone at once. That’s why Jay and I decided to narrow down the scope and target our MVP to match people based on shared passion in order to build a core team for start-ups.
Research time
We’ve built a survey to understand what is the most important criteria for a team to be successful and sent it to a relevant sample of professionals with experience in teamwork and start-ups.
To get a deeper understanding of the user we also did interviews with 8 people that founded/worked in a start-up and/or tech industry and were somehow involved in the process of hiring/building a team.
Our key findings confirmed the assumption that shared passion is indeed important for successful teamwork. This is what connects the people and ignites the spark to work together. However, in order to retain great teamwork, passion is sometimes not enough. Without good communication, it’s probable that the spark they had, in the beginning, will fade and be replaced with frustration and anger caused by miscommunication.
We created HMW statements
HMW match people with a shared passion and complementary personalities into a team so they can accomplish the goals that have been set.
HMW match people to work on the same goals with the same passions while ensuring great communication
Then, how do we ensure good communication? If there is a good personality fit, there will be good communication.
Ok, but this was not news to us. To match complementary personalities was one of our deliverables. Our stakeholders requested that a step where you fill a personality test has to be on the prototype. However, after many discussions over our research findings, we got to the conclusion that personality cannot be determined based on a test over an app, at least not at this point where the short tests out there are not as developed and accurate. Personality is much more than some questions you answer. The real personality test is happening in real life.
Ideation and creation
Hence, when we did the MOSCOW method to decide what features to include in the prototype, we agreed on not adding a personality test, even though it was a deliverable. We were a bit worried about sharing this decision with the stakeholders but, in the end, with our research backing us up — they accepted our proposal to remove the personality test. I felt proud that we stuck with the research findings and fought for what we believed in, and won.
With the test off the table we decided to focus on:
• Making an easy onboarding from the point of view of our persona
• Browsing and choosing between profiles that only match the user, based on the onboarding
• Start connecting if a match occurs (on the other side, the start-up also needs to pick you for a match to happen)
When doing the user flow and the low fidelity prototype, a request from the stakeholders was to onboard the user and get him to browse profiles as fast as possible so he doesn’t lose interest and so he can feel how the app works. As far as they concern, after exploring the app, the user can go back to complete the profile for more and better matches.
At this point, we had to ask a few questions:
• What is the minimum information that we need about the user in order to suggest good matches?
• What are the minimum instructions the app needs to provide to the user in order for him to understand what is it about and why he needs to provide the information about himself?
• Is creating a short onboarding the right thing to do? Are the stakeholder’s assumptions correct?
The first question was answered by our stakeholders, based on their algorithm.
To answer the second and the third questions, as UX designers there was only one thing we could do: Test it!
After doing some low-fi prototype testing with the help of our classmates (ideally we should have tested with the people we interviewed, or with potential users, but time was not a friend of ours), we analyzed the feedback and the conclusion was: Let the user be in control!
We made the user flow in a way that after 3 simple fast steps where (1) the user confirms his personal information taken from LinkedIn (2) set his location (3) choose topics he’s passionate about, he gets to decide whether he wants to fill in more information or to skip to the homepage and start browsing. This basic information is enough for the algorithm to offer some matches. We also integrated some instructions on the way but tried to keep them short.
Setting the tone
Everything we did up until now took us just a bit more than a week.
We were slightly behind our schedule but positive we still have plenty of time for the rest. Lesson learned: It’s never enough time.
In the last days for the project we covered :
• Mid fidelity wireframes
• Branding (Logo, colors, moodboard)
• High fidelity wireframes
• Prototyping
This part of the project was very challenging for us and cost us many hours of sleep. Each one of us had different opinions on how the app should be visualized. We couldn’t agree on anything and we felt stuck and unmotivated. But suddenly, after we were down we reached a breakthrough. After many many iterations, finally, everything started to fall in place. We found the colors we were looking for, we found the mood and agreed on the final layout of the profiles’ pages. With no time to spare, we jumped back into Sketch to design the high-fi wireframes and prototype.
The final obstacle we had to go over was prototyping. We decided to do it in Principe so we can make animated interactions, which was a big pain in the neck. Principle is a great powerful tool–if you have time to understand and practice its principles. If not, It can become your worst enemy in minutes. Especially when you need to present the prototype in the next few hours.
These hours were stressful, probably the most stressful in the whole 9 weeks of the bootcamp, but eventually, we made a fair prototype to present in front of our classmates and the stakeholders in our final Hack-show.
My takeaways and future steps
I’m glad that I made the decision to work on a real project with real stakeholders for my final bootcamp project. I could have chosen to develop my own idea and that would have been the easier choice.
But with this opportunity, for two weeks, I’ve learned so much about :
• Start-ups and the business world
• How to communicate with stakeholders and defend your design decisions
• Design sprints and how to work at a fast pace. Two weeks to develop a prototype are not much. Sticking to time management and a road map is crucial because it’s easy to carry away with thinking and discussion so, at certain points, you need to learn how to make a decision and move on.
Next step for this project will be :
• Designing the user flow of the startup Point of view
• Adding the chat and possibly a video call option
• A lot more usability testing
Thank you for reading, may the (co) force be with you!
