User Experience Designer
Discover New Ways to Grab Attention
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Project (Capstone):
A new social media experience centered around enabling creative storytellers to share their passion and artistic talent with a vibrant community.
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Roles:
User Interface Designer, Experience Researcher, Visual Designer, Trailer Designer, and Website Designer.
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Team:
Andrew McDonald (Software Developer & Team Leader)
Luc Demoulin (Project Manager)
Giovanni Iriarte-Young (UX Designer)
Javad Goudarzi (Experience Research and UI Designer)
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Date:
November 2019 - June 2020
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What is Project Enclavs?
Project Enclavs is a new social media mobile application dedicated to providing creatives with a space to share their artistic talent, passion, and creative voice with the world. The app is designed specifically for people interested in poetry, storytelling, comedy, and audible entertainment.
Trailer:
Features:
Enclavs signature feature are shorts, a unique and unprecedented way to share your favorite audio pieces with visuals to share your story. Shorts are posted on your profile page, and also feature in the apps feed. Other users can interact with your shorts, choosing to like them, remix them, or comment on them. Remixing is another key feature of the Enclavs app, and allows users to edit other users shorts and create their own shorts with them, or sequences, a series of shorts put together.
One of our User Personas:
Process:
Project Enclavs was developed over a span of six months. Originally, our team began with the ideation phase where we generated over 200 potential ideas we were interested in potentially exploring to a greater degree in a design "exorcism".
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After this "exorcism", we spent around a month narrowing down these ideas to focus on what we wanted to create. We decided to head in the direction of social media. As a result, we conducted extensive user research, following the user centered design process. This involved conducting user interviews, creating personas, creating customer journey maps, and identifying design requirements.
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After three months, in Spring 2020, we finished the UCD process and began designing the interface of our app as well as creating the final product. On my team, I worked to design mockup screens as well as develop a design system for our product. Our team pushed the beta version of our app to the Google Play Store on May 1st. Since the push, we have marketed our product, developed a landing page and created a movie trailer.
High Fidelity Screen Mockups:
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User Flows:
Reflection:
Working on project Enclavs over the duration of the past six months has taught me a lot about myself as a human being, as a designer, and as a team member. The amount of dedication, hard work, passion, and at times, pure grit necessary to complete this project was a lot and as a result I believe the finished product reflects the incredible effort my team and I put into this project. Working on this project, I encountered the greatest difficulties in collaborating with team members I often did not see eye to eye with at times and lacked the ability to collaborate in person with due to the circumstances of the Covid-19 outbreak and social distancing orders. This made collaborating on our projects, working on it in the same setting impossible and thus made the project much more difficult. Even more challenging was the arise of these hinderances during the last and most crucial stages of development of the project. The fact our team was able to create such a high quality product, and successfully complete it in time, as well as push it out to the Google Play Store showcases our willpower, determination, and dedication, all key attributes to be successful in any field in ones life.
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These circumstances showed myself that I have the capacity to adapt to any circumstance and emerge successful as long as I persevere and continue to struggle with my head held high. Charles Darwin discusses in his book, Descent of Man, that those individuals in the society best predisposed to be successful are not those who are the strongest, or even the smartest, rather those with the greatest capacity to adapt to the changing circumstances of life. If there is a wall, figure out how to go over it, if you can't, dig under it, go around it, whatever it is and whatever it takes, get to the other side. Interestingly, working on this project in these rough circumstances taught me this and made me a better stronger person, not merely a better designer.