Pathways by Little Black Buddha is an IOS mobile app that guides users through a gamified journey of self discovery during transitional periods of their life.
I along with a team of UX Designer met with LLB to design the product. As the team lead on this product design, I lead all client communication, user research to validated the user's journey through the design.
My Contribution:
User interviews, Data Synthesis, Usability Testing, Brand Identity, Visual Design
Our Objective
We were tasked to build a solution that will assist and guide young adults and mid-skill workers during transitional periods during their careers.
Our Outcome
We created a unique and creative interactive website that allows our users to gain direction and cultivate their best self. The users were able to set objectives, discover self worth, and provide sense of encouragement through our design.
RESEARCH
Our research goal aimed to gain insight on our user’s transition of life changes, understand their barriers and identify their resources. To better understand our users, we proceeded to conduct interviews to validate the their self discovery and personal narrative.
Validate
After we conducted user interviews and validated our assumptions. We took our data and developed them into actionable insights which allowed us to create essential features to solve our user’s problem along their journey.
Key Insight #1: Users need new perspective to gain direction and cultivate their best self
Key Insight #2: Users need to set an objective to give themselves direction
Key Insight #3: Users need to discover their self worth through personal introspection
Key Insight #4: Users need a sense of encouragement when striving to better themselves
Pathways Emotional Journey Before
From the insights we developed a user journey and identified positive and negative emotions of Pathway’s target user. We took our key insight and layered them along her journey to elevate and influence her emotional experience.
Pathways Emotional Journey After
With our four key research insights we have targeted moments where LLB Pathways can impact her emotional journey within her day to decrease frustration and create a deeper engagement.
Our Focus
Being able to define our target user and understand their journey, really set our focus and our approach on:
How might we provide young adults and mid-skilled workers with an interactive resource that guides and recognizes their goals, intentions, and ‘superpowers’ while guiding them towards a successful career path?
Key Insight
#1 Users need new perspective to gain direction and cultivate their best self
#2 Users need to set an objective to give themselves direction
#3 Users need to discover their self worth through personal introspection
#4 Users need a sense of encouragement when striving to better themselves
Key Features
#1 Users can utilize a map to navigate through their journey
#2 Users can view their recent activity and set reminders to complete exercises.
#3 Users are able to track their personal discovery and progression.
#4 Users are able to collect badges.
Design
Once we identified our target user, user’s journey and key features, we kicked off our design studio along with our client. We were able to take both, our sketches and client’s idea and created one comprehensive design. We then took our sketches and created a mid-fidelity prototype in Figma.
After conducting multiple rounds of usability testing and refining our design, we ultimately distilling a site that will not only serve users but perhaps even delight them. In addition to our feedback, our testers were delighted with the final design and expressed that it would be beneficial to access on a mobile device via native app.
High-Fidelity Mock Ups
Pathways redefines how we transition through career change. This responsive website and mobile app focuses on user’s journey by allowing them to cultivate their best self by setting objectives, discover self worth and provide sense of encouragement.
Learnings
We found that the periods of transition can be examined in various ways. The user interview validated our assumptions along with our client’s assumptions. We were able to develop a resources that allows our users to cultivate their best self, set objectives, discover self worth, and provide sense of encouragement.
Our website address each pain points our users experience during their transition in life by providing a journey map of self discovery, progress bar, tracking achievement through a badge book, and the ability to view recent activity and set reminders.
Our recommended next steps would hand off our spec document to the development team so they could build a the responsive website and mobile website.
Many thanks to the Ahlia, Founder of Little Black Buddah, for the opportunity to create, design and develop Pathaways.
