project+ aer

Project Summary

Design Challenge

Capstone Project, Freelance

Creative directors in the design industry crave a way to hire, build and maintain interdisciplinary freelance teams and produce projects.

Design Approach

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Product Team ****

Client

Annette Sung - Aer Founder

JNJ Team

Jeremy Platt - Project Manager, Lead UX Prototyper Nastassia Molicheva - Lead UX Architect Jamila Wallace - Lead UX Researcher

project aer+ inspiration

Interest

Working with creative directors and design talent, Annette Sung had been witness to many of the issues plaguing the formation and management of product teams. Product managers had been having a hard time getting reliable talent and could only count on personal references. Diversity of perspective was limited due to an insular talent pool. Talent was missing creative opportunities and direction to grow their services. Things were not working and everyone knew it. It was time to change and it was then that Annette decided to step in and make a difference by creating Aer with the goal to tackle these problems. Partnering with CUNY’s UX Design program she was connected to JNJ.

Annette Sung

Annette Sung

CUNY TechWorks UX Program wins Program of the Year from CEANY

CUNY TechWorks UX Program wins Program of the Year from CEANY

Background

CUNY saw the opportunity in focusing on these issues since those same problems directly affected their students and chose JNJ to take up the mantel of assisting Aer in its mission.

JNJ had already been exposed to these issues as we looked beyond our classes to future jobs.  We also had lots of experience in the past managing our own creative businesses and freelancing opportunities.  It was a chance to go through the full design process and apply all of our combined experience in and out of the classroom.  Our team knew right away that we wanted to take on this project.  After we sat down with Annette and outlined our process, things instantly clicked with her vision.

Research

JNJ began the UX design process by getting inspiration FROM our client’s brand, goals, assumptions, and completed research. As a team, we proceeded to map out our OWN research goals, assumptions, questions and methodology. One of the first goals was to inspect the competition to understand where opportunity might exist in the market.

One of our main values as a team was to not only let each other be the owners of our respective responsibilities but also help each other out whenever possibleNastassia and I assisted our research lead, Jamila Wallace, in the research process by researching the competition and doing heuristic evaluations.

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Reviewing the competition yielded opportunities in team formation & management. This set up Project Managers as our primary research subjects and Creative Talent as our secondary subjects.

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project aer+ ideation

Research Synthesis

From the competition we also deduced what could set Aer apart from other project management tools would be connecting them directly with talent.  This indicated we needed to research what would attract talent as well as what would assist project managers in finding and managing that talent.

Setting the stage, Jamila, organized the process of interviewing and analysis of the response. While each of us divided up the interviews, Nastassia focused on creating assumptive personas and user journeys, based on our research subjects, to review with our client.

It can be difficult to juggle so many different relationships and assets as you move forward on a project.  We stayed in contact with our peers who were working on different projects with different clients.

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Our original research plan focused on understanding how creatives want to describe themselves in order to develop a profile. The insights gained shifted our perspective on goals.

Our original research plan focused on understanding how creatives want to describe themselves in order to develop a profile. The insights gained shifted our perspective on goals.

Many were struggling with a lack of client communication or internal miscommunication. It turned out to be a great boon that we established open communications internally and multiple check-ins with stakeholders throughout the project. Combined with organized documentation, it allowed us to shift our approach throughout to best meet our challenges.

After gathering all of our sources, we noticed some patterns and preferences.  One insight that we gained was that creative talent wanted to take on projects that met their career goals as well as enabled their growth.  Another insight was that creative managers needed talent that had not only the skills required but also the right approach, soft skills, and diversity of perspective.

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Design Sprint

Grouping our HMWs into overarching themes, we prepared to vote on our top priorities in the design sprint.

Grouping our HMWs into overarching themes, we prepared to vote on our top priorities in the design sprint.

As we contemplated our initial insights, we reflected on how we wanted to proceed. One of our mentors, Michael Suen, is a big advocate of the Design Sprint.  I reached out to him to confer about our potential plan to run a sprint with our client.  After a few suggestions and an enthusiastic approval by Michael, we set up a day to do a sprint with our client contact and gave her an idea of what to expect.

We kept the design sprint small, just the four of us.  Running the sprint, I took us through a few exercises after reviewing the research.  As Jamila and Nastassia set up our initial findings and user journeys, Annette and I grounded Aer’s brand through an association exercise. Afterward, we joined up with Jamila and Nastassia for their brief.  Based on the landscape presented, we then all participated in time-boxed exercises designed to align our vision and give us a way forward.

Starting with a How Might We Affinity Map, we explored how our vision changed based on research and voted on our new priorities. These priorities inspired our next post-it note exercise: Feature Affinity Mapping. We further clarified this brainstorm by aligning each potential feature to effort vs. impact coordinates and then placed where each feature would influence the users’ journey to see what part we should focus on for our prototype and usability testing.

JNJ & Aer at WeWork doing a Design Sprint

JNJ & Aer at WeWork doing a Design Sprint

We eventually settled on exploring what information enticed people to sign up for the job matching service and then how our unique products impacted their sign-up process.

By involving the client in these exercises, we were able to completely align the project for all parties and illuminate the way forward to achieve the biggest impact for the effort involved.