What’s the context?
CedarLive is my capstone project, designed to provide a platform for domain experts and learners for professional learning and career advice.
Tools
Figma, Photoshop, Miro, Marvels
My role
As a solo UI/UX Designer, I conducted research, designed information architecture, wireframing, ideation, evaluation, visual design, low-high prototyping, and user testing.
Timeline
August 1st, 2020 - January 1st, 2021
(5 months)
CedarLive at a Glance
Live-streaming anytime, anywhere
As a user, you can watch tutorials, inspiring talks, join workshops through CedarLive, the mobile app.
CedarLive at a Glance
Follow a speaker
You can follow any speaker you want and get notifications so that you won’t miss this speaker’s future live-streaming.
CedarLive at a Glance
Post or gain reviews and
grow into an expert
At the same time, upload your works, resume, or portfolio for professional feedbacks and reviews from people in your career fields.
How CedarLive is Designed?
Discovering The Problem
On the market, there isn't a platform for these two groups of people to gain mutual benefits.
Domain Experts
(1) The current sharing platform is Lacking real-time engagement and flexibility.
The most challenging part is sharing with a larger group of people but still with enough interaction with the audiences and learners.
(2) Domain experts have limit time and schedule.
They want to maximize time utilization to sharing in public and establish their reputation.
(3) Domain experts like to coach learners.
Knowledge sharing is an excellent way to build a tight-knit community, and most experts are happy to share their experiences and tips with those who are just new to the fields.
Learners
(1) Gaining feedbacks is a complicated and time-consuming process.
Finding an expert who can fit time schedules or fields is complicated, time-consuming, and learners struggle with it.
(2) Learners have limit time and schedule.
Learners are usually at school or seeking a job with a hectic lifestyle.
(3) Most learners can not afford mentorship.
The average cost of a career coach is from $100 - $150 per hour, which is expensive for students and new graduates.
Design Process
Research Plan
Secondary Research
Conducting literature review to gain insights and make research assumptions.
(20 Articles)
Screener Surveys
Allow me to get the characteristics of a certain population relatively quickly.
(45 Respondents)
Competitive Analysis
In parallel, looking into what’s existing in the product market to see what user needs are overlooked.
(3 Competitors)
Interviews
Dive deep into user problems based on survey findings.
(6 Interviewees)
Secondary Research
First, I read some articles before the primary research to quickly understand people who pay for career coaches and current career markets.
Experts’ Needs
- Why? Engrain and expand knowledge, established reputations as an authority, and increase professional value.
- How? Becoming a mentor, writing articles, training others, being a resource, and taking the lead.
Learners’ Frustrations
- Arrange from $100 - $150 per hour
- Expensive for students and new graduates
Career Screening Survey
Second, I sent out a survey to 45 participants.
More than half of them would love to share and learn professional knowledge, no matter if they are working professionals, students, or unemployed.
However, people lack a safe and authorized platform to communicate and study with huge user demand.
The primary goal of this survey is to understand:
- Are people willing to share professional suggestions and knowledge?
- What types of tools are currently used to communicate or share?
- What makes it harder for people to share their professional expertise?
Do people love to share?
85% of people would love to share their expertise, as well as to learn from others; no matter if they are working professionals, students, or unemployed.
Where do they share?
Nowadays, people pay high tuition fees to learn at Bootcamp, look for unauthorized and confusing information on search engines, and spend time networking with professionals.
What makes it harder?
People with a busy lifestyle, an introverted personality, and who do not know where to find a trusted platform make knowledge sharing harder.
Competitive Analysis
After conducting the secondary research and screener survey, I did a competitive analysis of three similar products: Linkedin, UX Coffee Hour, and Medium.
I found out that even though these platforms allow people to connect and learn from each other directly, but they usually come with a monthly fee, time-consuming professional networking, and can not gain knowledge anywhere and anytime.
Qualitative Research - Interviews
Expert Interview
I talked to three working professionals who had mentorship experience and asked them how they felt about their mentoring experiences using the existing products.
Pain Points:
- I answer the same questions multiple times.
- People do not show up at the scheduled time.
- It is confusing that we meet in different places/platform.
Audience Interview
At the same time, I found three students/job seekers looking forward to connecting with professionals and getting feedback on their works/portfolios/resumes. I want to know how they connect with professionals and how was their experiences.
Pain points:
- Takes more than one week to make an appointment.
- How can I let more people hear my ideas and know my projects?
- Most online courses and mentorship are expensive.
- Online courses are recording video not real-time (Lack of interactive).
- Introverted personality.
Affinity Maps
In order to visualize the interviews as a whole and pull out the pertinent parts, I created an affinity map. This time, the data naturally fell into two different categories for different questions I asked during the interview.
Persona
Finally, based on the survey and user interview data I collected through my research, I created two user personas.
Key Finding
I learned that while experts and learners have a high level of motivation to connect, they need support to achieve it. The platform should create online career sharing convenient and efficient and allow people to connect using their fragmented rest time.
Share anytime, anywhere.
The target market users usually have busy lifestyles. Our platform allows them to use a fragment of time to communicate without pressure.
Get professional advice.
Free, efficient, targeted, and professional advice.
Follow and connect.
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. Users should gain mutual benefits and grow together.
Build reputation.
Build reputation and domain influence in the career field.
Opportunity
How might we create a high-engagement online career community that can help connect people who need to share or gain knowledge in their areas anytime and anywhere?
Hypothesis Framing
The Solutions
Live-streaming anytime, anywhere
As a learner, you could be anywhere to watch live streaming, which domain experts hold in your career fields. You could get the most-update new and trending and valuable tips, listening to how experts got their first job and deal with workplace relationships.
As an expert, you could share expertise with a large audience and help those who are lost in the field of work and build your reputation. The real-time interaction brings your audience closer to you and opens a great communication channel.
As a positive career community, users only need the time it takes for lunch or a cup of coffee; we learn together and grow together. Through CedarLive, users can easily and quickly learn and communicate.
Post reviews and grow into an expert
As a learner, you can post your work online and get valuable and large amounts of feedbacks in a short period of time.
As an expert, you can give out your suggestions to learner’s work in a convenient and effective way.
As a positive career community, mentorship is a two-way street, gets users to interact and motivate each other to improve.
Follow a speaker and get notifications for the future.
As a learner, if you like the speaker and do not want want to miss any live stream she/he holds, simply click “Follow” to get a notification for the future.
As an expert, follow others through CerdarLive and listen to different voices. Share and improve yourself at the same time, there is no end to learning
As a positive career community, users can connect and follow others and build a long-time relationship in career.
Site Map
I generated a site map to make sure I stayed focused on the features and screens that were essential to the app, understand the architecture, and ensure that the navigation is structured intuitively for users.
User Flows
Task 1
Post a comment during a live-streaming
Task 2
Post a review for other’s work
Task 3
Follow speakers and get future notifications
Wireframes and Wireflows
Wireframes: With my structure confirmed, I moved on to the full wireframes for both red routes. The goal of this user testing is to see the functionality and if it’s easy for the user to complete tasks.
Wireflows: The next natural step was to organize the wireframes so that they mapped out the routes that every user would travel when using the app. It allowed me to make sure I had all the screens I needed and curbed any screens I wanted to design that wasn’t essential.
Task 1. Post a comment during a live streaming
Task 2. Post a review and rating
Task 3. Follow a user
Styleguide
- Before turning my low-fidelity wireframes into hi-fidelity mockups, I created a style guide to aid in the visual design process.
-I wanted the UI of this website to be gentle, eye-catching, and approachable. I chose to go in this direction because while the website's nature is trustworthy and comfortable, I want users to feel relaxed, which would reduce their stress.
- The logo was inspired by the leaves of the cedar.
User Testing and Iteration
Results
After three weeks of user research, analysis and redesign, I validated the assumptions and changes I had made. I did this by testing my clickable prototype with five new users. The results are:
Divided live stream by different categories on the home screen.
5 out of 5 users found the category they wanted on the home screen.
Eliminated the condition of error exit live-streaming:
4 out of 5 users could get back to the original page if they exited accidentally in 5 seconds.
Followed a speaker in different ways with auto reminding for future notification.
5 out of 5 users sent a comment to interact with the speaker in 10 seconds and chose to get future notifications when an instruction move in to guide them.
Reduced repetitive steps to encourage people to complete the post-review process.
5 out of 5 users easily submit their reviews and ratings for a work.
Final Thoughts & Takeaways
Next steps.
- If I were to take this project further, I would implement certain high-priority features like my profile-editing, reporting other users or speakers, and doing a few more rounds of A/B testings.
- Users may come from different countries and speak other languages, so it would be beneficial to design subtitles features in live streaming for users of different nationalities.
Conclusion.
- It made sense to design this app. In this project, I had three user testing rounds, which reflected where users got stuck or what they liked/didn't like about the app.
-I finally got out of my comfort zone, but this project showed me how vital user research and user testing are to create a standout product.
-I learned a lot about analytics! I learned a lot about analytics! Putting together all the data I've collected from people and guiding me to better designs has taught me to be more intentional in my design process.