Bring your design ideas to life with Spot!
My Role
Visual Designer | Product Strategy
Skills Utilized
Ui design
Ux research
Prototyping
Duration (Academic)
4 months | Aug 2023 - Dec 2023
Collaborators
Shubham Jumde, Muskan Malik
Mentor: Blake Hudelson
A service platform to empower our future designers
CONTEXT
The design industry faces a significant challenge in providing a supportive ecosystem for emerging UX design students, where they can showcase their talents, protect their ideas, and access meaningful opportunities for collaboration and growth. Existing platforms often lack comprehensive solutions to address these multifaceted needs, leaving design students feeling isolated, undervalued, and vulnerable to exploitation.
As design students, we are well aware of these platforms
Linkedin: trying to connect with industry professionals
Behance: trying to find/ belong to a design community
Pinterest: trying to find some inspiration for design
We constantly find ourselves scrolling on these platforms, but we still face one issue...
The design industry lacks a supportive ecosystem for UX design students to showcase talents, protect ideas, and access collaboration opportunities.
The Outcome
The gap in the design industry prompted the conceptualization and development of Spot – a revolutionary platform dedicated to empowering design students and fostering a vibrant community of creative thinkers.
Connect with like minded people!
The community dashboard that curates content for you based on your interests and pitch ideas, so that you can get a chance to work with other creators.
Research Techniques
Instead of jumping straight into desk research, we decided it made more sense for us to get all our assumptions, ideas, and knowledge out on paper first (or in our case- a huge whiteboard!)
This laid the foundation of our service.
This laid the foundation of our service.
This laid the foundation of our service.
This laid the foundation of our service.
This laid the foundation of our service.
Brainstorming
We began with quiet a few assumptions from our end, but it led us to the ideal journey that we would want as designers seeking this new service.
...I think inspiration is the initial part, there's actually delivering the feature itself...
...the first one is obviously getting a hold of [industry professionals].
INSIGHTS: STUDENTS
Design students are frustrated with networking efforts, when it comes to lack of responses.
They sometimes get uncomfortable with in-person interactions, not knowing how to proceed with the conversations
Students rely on peer and professor feedback to improve their projects.
INSIGHTS: PROFESSIONALS
In organizations, it's challenging to find the time and space for ideation and improvement
Generating new ideas through research and competitor analysis is essential for product development.
Professionals feels execution of ideas is hard. Turning ideas into a reality is the real challenge.
Even though we started off to create a multi-sided platform, catering to both the students as well as the industry professionals; but due to the project scope and time constraints, we decided to only focus on the students’ side of the journey for this project.
What are the students & professionals saying?
To understand what UX design students actually go through, and to get the perspective of the industry professionals on the other side as well, we conducted seven user interviews
We mapped our ideal vs current user journey, to identify potential
Opportunity Areas
Designers should be encouraged to continue improving their pitches and trying to connect with more professionals, while waiting for replies.
Preventing demotivation
Spot should be designed to increase the chances of students getting connected with professionals to set up meetings to pitch their ideas.
Increasing chances of connection
Ease of finding relevant professionals
Spot should make it easy for design students to connect with the professionals they want, based on relevancy for their pitch ideas.
Encourage to continue
In cases of pitches not getting approved, Spot should ensure that students are still motivated to continue iterating, improving, an coming up with new ideas!
Help improve pitches
Spot should suggest improvements and feedback on the pitches uploaded by students, before their pitch meetings with professionals- increasing the chances of their ideas being approved.
Insights
AKA what needs to be done
Journey to Creating our Dream Product
The road to creating the final designs wasn’t straightforward- from starting with touchpoints that didn’t work out, to numerous iterations on what functionalities to include in our product, it was a journey full of learnings at every stop.
First wireframes & learnings
During our initial brainstorming sessions, we knew we wanted to design for two touchpoints: mobile app for the ease of access to the platform, and a web app for the ease of usability to create pitch presentations. After numerous working sessions where we created wireframes for both, it became evident to us that due to our time constraints, we will need to focus on the touchpoint that makes the most sense for the use of our product: a web app.
We learnt that we can’t design for all our ideas due to constraints put in place by the project scope, and sometimes we have to do trade-offs to achieve the optimal results.
Final Stop: The Product
When a professional is interested in my pitch, I should be able to have a conversation with them and then set up a meeting to discuss my pitch, according to both of our schedules.
USER TASK 1
When I open Spot, i want to upload my own pitch and get suggestions on how to improve it, so that I can be confident in my meetings.
USER TASK 2
After multiple iterations for our brand name and logo form, we landed on one that makes perfect sense for the service and the story we want to tell through it.
Visual Identity & Branding
Helping you polish your way into a more confident designer, who can pitch their ideas to professionals and peers alike.
Merging with the concept of “human connection”
Finding the diamond (you!) in the rough is so easy with Spot!
Spot
spot.com
Spot
spot.com
In your browser
Brand values are crucial for establishing trust, differentiation, and emotional connections with both employees and customers, driving loyalty and consistent brand experiences.
Tying it in with our Brand Values
The biggest learning of this project was to learn when it’s best to change directions vs when it’s better to carry on. For our brand name, we started with “vertex”, coming up with the concept of “a meeting point of 2 lines, resonating with the point where a creator and a professional can meet”.
But neither the concept, nor the logo form landed with our test audience. So we went back to our design desks and decided to rethink our concept. After numerous brainstorming sessions, “Spot” was born, with a new logo form.
We started with an idea for this platform, and realized along the way that designing everything won’t be possible. After a thorough discussion, we decided to let of the “multi-sided platform”, and only focus on the part that makes sense for us to make right now- the design student side.
1.
2.
Next Steps
Next up, I would still like to expand on the part that we left out, and create a whole platform that’s able to incentivize the professionals to use Spot as well- thus creating a holistic community with benefits for everyone.
Visual journey of Spot
How can UX design students gain visibility and recognition in a competitive landscape?
Why glory?
GLORY
Where can creators find a vibrant community to share ideas, get inspired, and stay updated on industry trends?
The big question
INSPIRATION
How can creators receive comprehensive feedback on their pitch presentations and improve their communication skills?
How to ensure growth?
GROWTH
What safeguards are in place to protect creators from potential idea theft when sharing their pitches?
What it means to us
TRUST
Because when is it ever a straight road? Now that we’re at the end, we can look back and see how far we’ve come, what we can learn from all the pivots we had to make, and what we can do in the future to make it a better product!
Learnings
