WEB APP DESIGN | DESIGN SPRINTS
Creating a Platform to Manage Experiential Learning Opportunities
Facilitator,
UX Designer
Sep - May 2023
Summary (for busy folks)
Praxis Impact is a platform that helps university officials, professors, and program directors manage and facilitate experiential learning opportunities (e.g., internships and term projects) within their institution and maintain relationships with clients/partners for future collaborations.
A team of 5 interaction designers and researchers used the Design Sprint methodology to ideate, design, and test the product in an iterative manner over 5 four-week design sprints. The final product was validated by field experts who expressed a strong interest in using it. The project was completed in 7 months (September 2022 to May 2023), and all assets, project links, and Figma files were handed over to the client in May 2023.
ABOUT PRAXIS IMPACT
Praxis Impact is a SaaS platform for client relationship and project management.
University officials and admins, program directors, and professors currently manage their outreach to clients for potential project opportunities for their students via Emails and Spreadsheets.
Praxis Impact seeks to resolve that issue by providing a one stop solution to manage all operational aspects of experiential education like managing partner (client) contact information, partner opportunities (projects/programs) and other engagements like signing a Scope of Work document and collaborating with team members.
WHAT IS EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING?
Experiential learning is "learning by doing" that bridges the gap between theory and practice. It takes many forms, from internships to service-learning, and benefits students in many ways, including deeper understanding, expanded perspectives, personal discovery, collaboration, professional development, community service, and self-confidence.
CHALLENGE
How to design a platform for end-user adoption and caters to their unique workflows?
TJ, our client, shared his department's unique workflow as a starting point. This beacon guided us to envision the end-product's flow, which we validated with other users and departments.
METHODOLOGY
We used the Design Sprint methodology (by Jake Knapp) to implement the workflow and design Praxis Impact. Design Sprints are quick and easy ways to solve big questions by brainstorming solutions, prototyping, and testing with users. Then implementing the feedback for next sprint.
RESEARCH
5 sprints of roughly 4-5 weeks were conducted between September 2022 and May 2023, focusing on different aspects of the platform (as per the shared workflow diagram).
5-6 experiential learning experts across different departments at University of Maryland volunteered to assist in research and test our designs in each sprint, helping us validate and refine our product.
Contextual Interviews
During the beginning of each sprint, contextual interviews were conducted with the experts to understand their unique experiential learning workflows, challenges, and pain points.
Fragmented tools: Managers use multiple tools, leading to data silos and difficulty managing programs holistically.
Manual knowledge transfer: Managers manually transfer knowledge to new team members, which is time-consuming and error-prone.
Siloed artifact management: Artifacts are scattered across systems and email trails, making them difficult to access and understand.
Scalability concerns: Managers struggle to scale systems and processes as programs grow, leading to disorganization and difficulty maintaining a single source of truth.
Other key insights from interviews:
To present findings to our client, we created two user personas:
Our team then pursued 2 user scenarios based on contextual interviews and user personas for our design concept.
DESIGN PROCESS
We followed Jake Knapp's Design Sprint process. It's is a five-day process for rapidly prototyping and testing new ideas with users. The goal is to quickly validate ideas and get feedback from users early in the design process. The design sprint process is divided into five phases:
Phase 1: The team brainstormed sprint questions, mapped the problem, and created HMW questions (and lightning demos).
Phase 2: Team members would individually sketch solutions. I would sketch mine using a whiteboard and scan and upload the picture to Miro.
Phase 3: Best ideas and standout features would be voted on, and a final storyboard is prepared by the team which reflect the final prototype.
Phase 4: The team assign roles (3 working on prototype, 1 stitcher linking the prototype and 1 testing moderator)
Phase 5: Prototype would be tested with our experential learning experts and their feedback would be discussed and implemented in the next sprint.
The visual below displays some of my contribution to the project:
Over the course of 5 sprints, we see updates to design of key pages with iterative testing and implementation of feedback.
PLATFORM TERMINOLOGY
We created a terminology for our product, after discussions with our experts, to portray homogeneity across all new users of the platform. These terms are partners, opportunities, and stages.
"Partners" are clients, projects are known as "opportunities" , and "Stages" are the life cycle of an opportunity.
Speaking of stages, the following are the levels/stages that each opportunity will go though:
To advance an opportunity from Prospect to Negotiation to Active to Completed, users must complete mandatory tasks for each stage. For example, to move an opportunity from Negotiation to Active, users must upload a signed Scope of Work.
SOLUTION
We refined our product flow and designs through sprints and testing to make it intuitive, relevant, and engaging for end users.
The product map of the final design concept can be found below:
Style Sheet and Component Library
I chose the Inter font family for Praxis Impact because it is neutral, professional, and legible.
The product map of the final design concept can be found below:
Color Palette
I chose blue as the primary color for Praxis Impact to convey trust and reliability (Diving into color psychology for a bit here).
Figma Components (Responsive, made using Auto-Layout)
Made Figma components (and varients) to be used in high-fidelity designs. Doing so helped me keep things usable, implament changes quickly across all screens and helped keep things organized.
Grid System
The team used a 12-column grid for the high-fidelity product design to ensure maximum responsiveness.
Dashboard
The Praxis Impact Dashboard provides users with a comprehensive overview of their opportunities, pending tasks, recent activity, and analytics. It is designed to help users make informed decisions about their experential learning workflow and improve their efficiency.
The dashboard is highly customizable, allowing users to add or remove widgets that are relevant to their specific needs. Some of the key features of the Praxis Impact Dashboard include:
Overview: Provides a snapshot of all opportunities, including their current stage, number of pending tasks, and recent activity.
Pending Tasks: Displays the most important pending tasks for each opportunity, in order of priority.
Recent Activity: Shows any new activity that has taken place across all opportunities, such as new tasks, messages, and status changes.
Analytics: Widgets can be added to the dashboard to track key metrics, such as Partners vs. Projects, Industry Worked In, and Stage Conversion Rate.
Adding Partners/Opportunities: A CTA that allows users to quickly onboard a new partner; or add a new opportunity and then assign it to a partner from the Dashboard.
Partner Directory and Partner Profile
The Partner directory (accessible from the side panel) lists all partners onboarded onto the Praxis platform. Users can also import external files (like spreadsheets), and map data according to their Praxis values.
Clicking on a Partner will redirect to the Partner Profile page. This page inlcudes:
Partner details: View the partner's location, website, and point of contact information.
Opportunities: View all opportunities associated with the partner, and filter them by status.
Satisfaction score: View the partner's satisfaction score, which is calculated based on feedback from team members, professors, students, and Praxis users.
This information can help you make an informed decision about whether to reach out to the partner for potential experiential learning opportunities.
Opportunity List and Opportunity Profile
The Opportunities List, accessible from the side panel, has a list, tile, and Kanban views to help users manage their opportunities.
From the Opportunity page, users can view/update status of the opportunity. They can also view and create tasks associated with each status and see the recent activity or documents uploaded for that opportunity.
KEY FUNCTIONALITIES
What makes Praxis Impact the best experiential learning platform? Why should universities, institutions and companies use Praxis Impact? The following are some key features that set this solution apart from existing solutions and CRMs.
#1 Praxis Impact lets admin users customize workflows for their organization.
#2 Find and connect with partners on Praxis Impact.
View list of all partners on the platform. Reach out to former clients, build and maintain relationships. Import existing spreadsheet/ partner data onto Praxis Impact.
#3 Task Management
Create and manage tasks. Set mandatory tasks that once completed can allow the user to update status of the opportunity.
CONCLUSIONS & LEARNINGS
Overall, I had a great experience working on this project. I got the opportunity to familiarize myself further with the Design Sprint methodology and to say I’m a fan of this process is an understatement. Thoroughly agile and frequent testing and iterations prompted us to create a product that’s not only backed by data but is also usable and completely caters to its core user base (based on early feedback that we’ve received).
Working with other designers and researchers on the team was also a great learning for me. Different opinions and subjective insights allowed me to look at the product from perspectives that I couldn’t have imagined. The notion of UX being a collaborative process was strengthened for me in this project, and I hope to continue learning further.
Being a facilitator for a Sprint also allowed me to take more of a leadership role. Managing different priorities, heading meetings and strategy and communicating with the team as well as stakeholders capped this project off to be influential to me in all regards.
