It's an online diary concept web app for design and coding projects to share with people.
Sole contributor
Conducted user research, created wireframes and flows, produced high-fidelity mockups.
2 months
Nearly three or four years ago, I created an Instagram account to get inspiration from people who have been learning to code and sharing their journey. Every day, they were writing what they're doing. It made me inspired to see them trying to learn something.
But people weren't just sharing their journey also posting some personal life stuff too. To be honest, I didn't care about their personal life, those posts were just a distraction for me.
My goal was to create an experience where I only focus on design or coding-oriented works to make better use of my time, away from all these personal sharing.
Deciding on whom I will speak with
First of all, before conducted interviews(ish), I categorized people into two categories.
- People who share their journey
- People who follow people that share his/her learning process
What was my goal for interviews?
Then, I had small talks with five people to understand:
- What are their reasons for using Instagram?
- Why did they decide to share this learning process on social media?
- What are the reasons behind following the learning process of other people?
For a more deep understanding of the thoughts, emotions, and motivations of people, I sum up my learning from the research.
I created empathy maps providing an overview of a person’s experience.
My research highlighted that people need experience in a more inspiring way.
Subsequently, to make sure I was building the right thing for users, I sharpened my focus to what exactly the core functionality of the app should be and the problems it should solve. I decided to center on two main titles.
- Share the process
- Get inspiration
Mapping out the experience
Before starting any design, I spent time making sense of task flows and potential content. It really helped me to grasp the flow sequence and logic easily.
Early sketches
Low fidelity wireframes
-Please click on pictures to zoom.-
I sorted stories by date because I thought of the project as an online diary. I didn't put any other choice on the table.
Also, I put all the stories under two main titles:
- Design
- Coding
While doing this, I aimed to filter stories according to their content and thus making it easy for users. (In fact, in the first version of the project, I'd divided stories into two categories; designers and developers. But after realizing that these two titles cause confusion, I changed it to design and coding.)
The primary purpose of this project is to share stories, so I wanted this option to beeasily accessible when users want to add a new story. And I decided to put it in the sidebar as a navigation link. (not like a small button on the home page)
Finding people who share his/her learning process requires research and it takes time in that applications don't recommend them directly.
Therefore I added the "Discover" page to the project, which will make it easier to find different people and projects. And on this page, there're two categories; designers and developers.
To prevent the complexity that may occur from having different accounts for each project, I thought that users should have more than one project space to share all their projects under a single account instead of many accounts. While doing that, my goal was to provide users more useful and simpler experience.