Septims Website Case Study — SpoonX Studio.
Septims — Bunch of great people who ♥️ OSS
Septims makes working on projects more fun and engaging by enabling creatives to come together in an open group and connects them with each other. But what it does best is that it provides everyone with a way to start giving back to the community right from the start of their career.
Problem.
Let’s face it — finding a job is tough and it’s even tougher for a junior. Why? because they don’t always have a portfolio filled up with some work. Building up a portfolio isn’t easy as coming up with ideas and executing them takes both time and energy.
Our challenge was to provide the simplest way that can help someone focus on one part of the project. With this they learn how others work, giving you the experience of working on a team so they don’t get nervous on their first job (Trust me, it happens!).
Team and Role.
Team: Oguzhan Ozdemir — Developer, Wesley Overdijk — Team Lead and Suraj Kumar(That’s me!) — Designer
Timeline: 2 weeks
I led all facets of design including: user flows, visual design and prototyping. Oz was responsible for all the dev work while Wesley took care of strategy and planning.
Process.
The most important question we asked ourselves “How do we make something that is simple yet effective?” So we sat together and talked about the strategy and made a roadmap for the project.
Let me show you what our two-week timeline looked like:
Week 1 — Research & Concept Creation
Week 2 — Design, Development & Launch
To identify if this project was worth building or not, we decided to conduct a research and see if people actually needed something like this or not. But we also wanted this to be a fast-paced process and instead of creating surveys we used LinkedIn. We shared a post there and started gathering the key pain points.
The response we got on LinkedIn was overwhelming, a lot of people needed something like this!
Although we knew that this could be something lot more than this, we focused on creating what people wanted.
After identifying the users need, we started creating user flows and moved towards the next week process.
We already had a few more people involved in the process, they came from the LinkedIn post. Once we had the page designed, we started testing it with these people and made iterations based on the feedback.
It was time for Oz to take over and he started making the page live and working. We continued to test the process that involved connecting people, this allowed us to iterate.
Solution.
Since simplicity was the key feature, and we wanted everyone to be in control and have a more open community.
So what did we come up with? It was very clear that we wanted to build a community and not some service, we decided on using Slack. Yes, you heard it right. Most of the people we talked to was a member of some slack group, so why not make everyone comfortable and not over-complicate everything.
Conclusion.
Septims was well received within the community. While the group is still invite based, it has already proved that this concept could definitely work.
This project was itself a test project to see if this idea worked or not.
We are certain that we just touched the surface of the entire collaboration system and need to do a lot more analysis to make this solution better. But maybe with this, people can find a way to work on their portfolios and we might even get to see some awesome projects getting build.
