📋 Context
Life's demands can overwhelm, making it easy to lose touch with our emotions amidst the daily grind.
This disconnect can lead to a decline in mental well-being, impacting our personal and professional lives.
In my role as a UX Design Lead, I championed a user-centric brand identity. Through research, ideation workshops, and cross-functional collaboration, I ensured our brand met user needs and resulted in innovative solutions. My focus on accessibility and usability testing guarantees a user-friendly experience aligned with our marketing goals.
⚡Problem
How might we help individuals discover and navigate clear career paths?
Statistics echoed the user sentiment. The data confirmed our hypothesis: the job search was not just a professional hurdle, but an emotional marathon.
💡 Solution
Supporting career path clarity through a focus on emotions and self-reflection.
UnCloud is a free mood-tracking platform that uses weather to help career seekers navigate their professional journeys by understanding and reflecting on their emotions. You can create a record of your day, including your mood, wins, and thoughts.
✨ Outcome
Uncloud was successfully launched in June 2024!
Initial outcome of UnCloud with yielded positive results. 80% of participants found the platform easy to navigate and appreciated its focus on self-awareness.
💪 Challenges
Overcoming design hurdles: from biases to breakthroughs
Here are some challenges we faced during our product development.
Bridging the Gap: Early in the process, internal biases skewed our initial assumptions. To bridge this gap, I led in-depth user surveys that unearthed valuable insights. This user research challenged our internal assumptions and ensured the final product resonated with what users truly needed.
Prioritization Under Pressure: With a tight 3-month launch deadline, user interviews were crucial. By prioritizing features based on user needs, we focused on building a strong Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that could be iterated upon later.
Maintaining Momentum: Scheduling constraints caused a temporary delay in design deliverables. To address this, we implemented agile communication with the development team. Constant dialogue ensured we could effectively prioritize functionalities and maintain a smooth development flow despite the setback.
👤User Research
To gain a deeper understanding of user struggles, we bypassed initial assumptions and went directly to the source: our users.
We conducted a survey involving 28 participants to identify their specific pain points. The findings from user interviews and surveys revealed a stark reality: job seekers were not only dealing with a skills gap but also grappling with stress, anxiety, and diminished self-confidence.
📚 Market Research
To understand the existing options, I conducted a market analysis of available mood trackers.
The market boasts a plethora of mood tracking applications. These platforms, however, primarily focus on general well-being, neglecting the specific emotional journey of career exploration.
We analyzed Daylio, DailyBean, and the 5 Minute Journal for mood tracking. Our study of their UIs and features revealed a trend: each app focuses primarily on either mood tracking or reflective journaling, but not both. When one feature is well-developed, the other tends to be lacking.
This competitive analysis informed our development of UnCloud. Unlike traditional career platforms that use static personality assessments, UnCloud captures the dynamic interplay of emotions in career decision-making, letting users record their moods, wins, and thoughts each day.
💁♀️Persona
We created the persona to address the emotional and practical challenges faced by career explorers.
Understanding and empathizing with user pain points is crucial in empowering individuals during their confusing times of career exploration.
🚀 Design process
Let's get into the nitty-gritty- let's delve into the creative process.
By conducting in-depth research, including interviews and surveys, we uncovered significant emotional and career-related hurdles. This informed the creation of essential tools like mood tracking and reflection prompts, aimed at empowering users to gain insight into their emotions and make informed career decisions.
🔥Feature prioritization
We identified a market gap: a shortage of tools tailored for navigating the emotional complexities of career exploration.
To meet this demand, UnCloud focuses on three key features: Weather based mood tracking, personalized journaling prompts, and statics that provides user insights
Track Your Work Mood
Mood-matched prompts
Based on your selected mood, our platform pulls from a curated library of emotion-specific reflection prompts.
Insights
Gain personalized insights into your emotional journey to understand your challenges.
📈 User flow
To ensure a seamless user experience, we created a user flow outlining the key steps involved in navigating Uncloud.
User flow in UnCloud is designed to be intuitive and seamless, guiding users through the process of tracking their moods, reflecting on their career journeys, and seeing progress.
☁️ Branding
After finalizing the platform's user flow, I led the branding efforts for UnCloud.
UnCloud uses weather metaphors to capture the emotional highs and lows of career exploration. This approach fosters deeper introspection by linking emotions with career choices, where "sunny days" represent confidence and positive decisions, while "stormy days" symbolize stress and job search challenges.
After conducting extensive research I selected five weather-based emotions to capture key experiences in career journeys, ensuring the metaphor is intuitive and impactful.
Once I selected the emotions, I sketched out ideas for each. During competitive analysis, I noticed most mood trackers used standard shapes with color or facial expression variations. Inspired by this and our name, UnCloud, I decided to emphasize clouds in our design.
📐 Wireframes
Our early designs were heavily inspired by mobile UIs, reflecting the prevalence of mobile mood trackers in the market.
Recognizing this bias, I researched further and shifted to a website dashboard layout as a more suitable approach. Initially, we chose a web app, believing it would stand out against influx of mood trackers in the market and be useful for assessing career reflection prompts on a computer when revaluation one's career.
📝 Usability Testing
Our design team validated design direction and uncovered future enhancements.
Process: We recruited seven individuals at different career stages to test our high-fidelity designs. We assessed user feedback on navigation ease, relatability, and design resonance.
Results: Our user study showed clear navigation (7/7 success) and (7/7) appreciation for the design elements of the website. However, a common issue emerged: users found it challenging to understand how to start logging their moods.
Future Enhancements: Additionally, the study highlighted the benefits of prioritizing a mobile design next, as well as enhancing customization options with more icons for users. Participants also noted issues with clutter in the left navigation and the mini-calendar losing functionality outside of the calendar view, which we aim to improve in our next iteration.
🔄 Design Iteration 1
Emphasizing an app-like UI initially was limiting because our primary target was a website platform.
This format didn't optimize for the larger screen real estate and different interaction patterns typical of web environments.
Before
We chose a web platform to stand out among mood trackers and to aid in reflection on a computer when revaluating one's career . However, this was not reflected in the initial app-like wireframe.
After
The redesign now features a dashboard-style layout, with a large central calendar for primary navigation. On the left, a mini calendar facilitates easy month-to-month navigation for an overview, while the right sidebar displays the user's mood and reflections for the selected date.
🔄 Design Iteration 2
User testing showed that users were unsure of what to do when they first visited our website.
Four out of seven users commented, "When I first entered the website, I wasn't sure where to start or what to do next."
Before
After signing up, although users were able to figure it out, they were unsure of where to begin. It took them a moment. This made us realize we needed some kind of indication.
After
We added a popup notification to guide users on where to begin.
🔄 Design Iteration 3
Initially, we wanted more features for reflections, with tools appearing on your screen based on the emotion you chose for that day.
However, this proved infeasible within our timeline, and user testing revealed that people felt overwhelmed by the numerous options.
Before
Initially, we imagined a tree-design UI that allowed for outlining sequential tasks, incorporating features such as goal-setting and motivational quotes.
After
After conducting a user survey, we streamlined our focus to include only reflection and mood tracking, as these were identified as the two main features users wanted to prioritize.
Taking the user feedback into note, they now only have the option to record either three wins of the day, or both.
🔍 Final Design
After extensive research, design work, and user testing, here is the finalized design of our website features.
Early user feedback indicated that Uncloud's interface resembled a mobile app and emphasized features over usability as a dashboard web design. In response, we conducted iterative design enhancements informed by user testing data. These efforts streamlined features, enhanced user experience, and introduced innovative components and refined interactions, all aimed at reinforcing Uncloud's core value proposition.
🏆 Next Steps
Although this MVP has concluded, we aim to leverage insights gained to enhance future iterations.
Key focus areas include:
Mobile Version Development: Enhancing journaling accessibility with a seamless mobile experience.
Icon Customization: Introducing more icons for enhanced user personalization.
Left Side Navigation Bar Redesign: Addressing clutter issues and improving mini-calendar functionality outside of the calendar view.
💖 Reflection
Embracing an iterative design process by continually refining designs based on feedback.
Working as the design lead for UnCloud was a fantastic experience, especially creating graphics and icons for the platform—I had a lot of fun with that aspect of the project. Embracing an iterative design process by continually refining designs based on feedback was crucial. Looking back, I believe involving users earlier would have been beneficial, as their insights could have guided our design decisions more effectively. Additionally, better communication among team members from the beginning would have streamlined our workflow and collaboration.
Through iterative design improvements based on user feedback, we successfully transformed UnCloud's interface into a more intuitive and user-friendly platform. The journey taught me valuable lessons in design leadership and teamwork, and I am excited about the positive impact our efforts will have on users.