CONTEXT
In March of 2025, I was invited to a meeting with the CEO of Plaza to discuss a potential role as a product designer within the startup. Plaza is a social market place dedicated for local artisans and craftsman to showcase their work and connect with their community in a much more intimate and social setting.
ROLE
Product Designer
TIMELINE
March 2025 - June 2025
TEAM
1 Product Manager
2 Front/Back End Developers
1 Marketer
TOOLS
Figma
Spline
My Contributions
Rapid Design
Designed and launched an end-to-end mobile app experience within one month on the apple store, driving 250+ organic downloads
Design System
Created a scalable branding guide and design system for more efficient development speed leading to 75% reduced development time
Iteration & Improvement
Redesigned onboarding and product flows, achieving 48% activation and driving 130+ listings and 30+ video uploads in the first launch cycle
THE PROBLEM
Arts and crafts seller are being overshadowed by other creators on social media
The authenticity of arts and crafts sellers are like no other and it is being overshadowed by the over-saturation of an overwhelming amount of content that is currently widely available online on various social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok.
UNDERSTANDING THE RESEARCH
Parsing through already conducted user research.
After being onboarded and understanding the problem that we were trying to solve, I then began to parse through all the various interviews and surveys that were conducted by the team beforehand in order to gain a bit more context as to what people have said in regards to this particular problem space.
NOTABLE INSIGHTS
Key metrics and data points from the research.
After fully understanding who I was designing for as well as who the different stakeholders are within this project, I began to dig deeper and conducted stakeholder research to understand the major goals that came from all the major players at The Daily Northwestern. Interviews were done both through in-person participants and stakeholder interviews done virtually
Understanding what business objectives I'm designing for.
After discussions with stakeholders, I began to understand more of the business goals and problems that The Daily Northwestern was facing. Through stakeholder interviews, it brought an entirely new perspective to the overall design process and allowed me to develop basic goals for this particular project to allow me to keep in mind what major business goals I am trying to achieve throughout this project
Some of those goals were as follows…
Increasing Student Readership
Increasing Writer Motivation
CURRENT STATE ANALYSIS
The Daily's current distribution network is mainly through two major sources.
One major method that the Daily distributes its articles is through the weekly emailing list called "The Daily Digest." Through this newsletter, students are able to obtain constant updates on different events or news happening across both on campus and throughout the college town of Evanston, Illinois. The newsletter automatically re-directs individuals to The Daily's news website. They also have different printing editions but are much less common compared to the newsletters.
THE PROBLEM
HMW create another pathway to spark interest in users to read the local news at Northwestern University?
USER RESEARCH
How do Northwestern students interact with The Daily right now?
Northwestern students have different relationships when it comes to using The Daily Northwestern on campus. As I am not incredibly familiar with using The Daily Northwestern, I decided to talk with 10 students about their experiences using The Daily to understand more about the user interactions The Daily has.
Here were some notable quotes that I was able to gain from the interviews:
RESEARCH ANALYSIS
Analyzing and coding research results.
I wanted to understand more about how current Northwestern students interact with The Daily Northwestern and understand their reactions and emotions when it comes to reading local news. After conducting the interviews, I jotted down various thoughts through post-it notes and on paper to materialize the ideas that I had. I used a research technique called "Coding" where I read through all the notes from the interviews first, then grouped each specific note into various categories by giving them "codes" or labels for better organization.
There were four distinct insights.
I wanted to understand more about how current Northwestern students interact with The Daily Northwestern and understand their reactions and emotions when it comes to reading local news. Here were some of the key insights that was obtained from the interviews with various Northwestern students:
Turning key user insights into opportunity areas for a solution.
Guided by UX research, I turned these four major key insights of both pain points and points of feedback into potential opportunity areas that could be explored further while also balancing the major goals and needs from the stakeholders as well.
BRAINSTORMING & IDEATION
Creating a mobile application for easier content distribution and access
When thinking about the first key insight gained from the user interviews, most individuals access various distribution sources from The Daily on their mobile application. So, what better way to ensure that the entry point to actually accessing the news is easy than creating a mobile application that users can download and easily access the news
Creating cardboard mockups for testing.
I created an initial batch of mock-ups that would be tested with various users. The mock ups were created through cardboard cut outs with pictures of phones that were glued on as I felt that physical, low-fi prototypes often feel more approachable for users. The users may feel more comfortable giving candid feedback on “paper/cardboard” than on something that looks finished.
USER TESTING & ITERATIONS
Low-fidelity v1: Initial Testing
I began to test the first design of the prototype with various users asking them to "scroll" through the entire cardboard prototype.
Discovering the importance of planning prototype depth.
From feedback with two users, I realized that my prototype lacked enough screens and status updates to accurately reflect the user journey. This wasn’t a design flaw, but rather a gap in my understanding of how to scope and plan prototypes for effective testing. This experience taught me the importance of aligning prototype fidelity with clear testing objectives.
Low-fidelity v2: Applying feedback and creating more thorough user flows.
After the early two user tests, I went and created another iteration of the design that would hold much more extensive screens and system status updates to provide users with more clarity on what they were doing on each screen.
Realizing the importance of familiarity and mental models with applications
After this test with the second iteration of the design, I came to understand how important familiarity is important when it comes to designing any digital application. Without a proper mental model on how something works based on an individual's familiarty with existing apps, it is difficult to design and create something that people will understand.
Low-fidelity v3: Creating multiple flows to a single destination
Understanding that users need freedom when using mobile applications, more screens and user flows were designed in order to allow users to achieve that freedom in navigating the mobile application.
Validating the designs and features of the application.
After gaining feedback on user flows and being able to fully flesh out those, users were then finally able to focus a lot more on the actual core features of the application allowing me to truly validate specific features that would be implemented into the mobile application.
