PROJECT OVERVIEW

As a UX Content lead on Global Spark's Digital team, I primarily worked on the project of redesigning the current Global Spark website. The redesign is centered around streamlining a modernized, user-friendly, branding cohesion experience.

Other projects that were allocated to me during the end of my position was a redesign of hacker dashboard for Hack the Globe and a ground up build for an accessible platform to organize the educational curriculum for users.

Background

Why is this redesign experience valuable for users?
Redesigning the user experience for a website can provide several valuable benefits to its users.

These enhancements ultimately result in a more user-friendly and engaging experience, allowing users to easily navigate the site, connect with the content, and achieve their goals efficiently.

Project Journey

Design Goals

When approaching the project, some of my key design goals were:
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First, to clearly communicate key changes after redesign, such as changes in landing page, our team page, and curriculum page.
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Second, I wanted to actively interact and support the engineers in the ideation and refinement to actively understand what could be pain points in specific designs in the the back-end or front-end.

Lastly, it was important that my design incorporated experiences that help the user navigate efficiently, whether that be through clarity in copywriting or supplementary touch points.

Design Audit

We performed a design audit of the current website on Notion. The audit was categorized by page, area, viewport, priority, status, issue description, and expected behavior.

Some key issues that were found are:

Research Insights

After gaining a good grasp of some problems through a cross-sectional design audit and where the pain points lie within the experience, I invited 8 university students to explore the website with screen-shared on Google Meet to see their digital interactions with the website. I identified a few key insights to guide my designs, the main insights being:

Concept Explorations

Once we felt like I had a good understanding of the redesign parameters, we iterated through mid-fidelity prototypes to visualize potential flows and interactions.

After we had a better sense of what the flow would look like, we explored a couple different website concepts and experimented with things like how I redesigned the icon on the landing page. After discussing with our senior designer and head of marketing and design and feedback from other designers, we decided to move forward a blend between all the different inspiration websites!

Nonetheless, the website is to digitally reflect the essence of the the organization. Therefore, we’ve maintained a cheerful and friendly essence, with a focus on simplicity tailored for the fresh and curious audience.

Former Landing Page Animation

Redesign Landing Page Animation

Design System

We created a style guideline consisting of brand colors and typography to guide the creation of the high-fidelity prototype.

Final Deliverable

Check out the prototype.

Reflection & Final Words

Collaborating with cross-functional teams to optimize for consistency, readability, and usability.‍
Engaging in this project provided me with invaluable lessons on collaboration at a larger scale. It marked my first experience into working on a product that demanded cross-collaboration integration among specialized teams and members (Marketing, Engineering, and Leaders). Throughout this experience, I gained insights into effective communication, time and priority management, and making the most of available resources within this unfamiliar workflow.

Applying research insights to inform design decisions‍
Through this project, I learned the importance of research-backed insights to increase confidence in design decisions and project direction.  

Communicating design rationale & incorporating feedback
Every month, I worked alongside full-stack engineers, front-end engineers, UX content leads, product design leads, managing director of of digital, senior designers, and head of marketing and digital.

Week by week, I learned more about communicating the ideas behind designs and how specific details added value to the overall project. Beyond communicating rationale, I learned how to navigate feedback across different teams and synthesize it to arrive at design changes.


I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to learn so much and being able to temporarily fill the shoes of our managing director of digital towards the end of my time with Global Spark. This experience was truly a fun and rewarding experience that made me a stronger designer.

A huge thank you to everyone that took time out of their day to chat with me, make me laugh, and teach me something new!