Project Management and Design | carollei.com
NEXUS is a network for self-motivated and driven students who are looking to connect with the like and find side projects to pursue.
Product Management + Product Design
Collaborators: Engineers, Business Team, Product Manager
September 2020 to January 2021
In September 2020, I start my role as a Product Design Lead at NEXUS UW. When I started, there was already a built and deployed MVP. On the site, there were two main functionalities – browsing through projects and browsing through people’s profiles. A user could also post projects, favorite projects, and communicate interest in a project. NEXUS was intended to be a mobile application, downloadable through an app store. The desktop view on a browser was simply a responsive “expanded” version of a mobile application.
Design of the 2019 MVP – home page.
In the first meeting, I immediately took a leadership role in leading the product team – design and engineering. I took charge of the execution and the advocation of the design process. The design process I followed was, loosely: gathering information, defining the problem, idea-generating, modeling. All of this was interweaved with feasibility assessments, decision making, evaluation, and communication. Of course, the design process is not always linear, so the steps were just a general framework through which we conducted our design work.
The first few weeks, we focused on onboarding and gathering information. We conducted, in this order, “casual” user research, competitive analyses, and usability tests. I asked everyone on the team, PM, and the business team included to the participant because I wanted to ensure that we got a wide range of perspectives, especially for the initial stages of the design process – information gathering.
Each week we worked on one of those deliverables, during meetings we reported what we found and discussed a bit. Then my design teammate and I went and extracted insights.
💡Insights
We found that students currently find project opportunity by: