Project B-STEM

Organization: Project B-STEM

Audience: High school girls - Young professionals

Overview: Every girl needs a support system to champion them on, in school and their careers. Project B-STEM is a non-profit organization that is creating an online platform for young women of color to find mentors and collaborate with others on their projects. Along with my design team, we delivered a mid-fidelity prototype for the stakeholder to demo to potential investors.

The Challenge: I was onboarded during the middle of this project. It had already been abandoned by a previous design team that deemed the project too daunting. My team, a group of junior UX designers/recent boot camp grads, had to pick up where the last team left off and untangle the brief, the research, and the current designs in play. This project tested our ability to work as a team and understand our constraints.

Deliverables: Components Library + Mid Fidelity Prototype

Design Team: Paige Chou, Stella Lee, Kelly Vu, Abegail Cariaso

Design System Library

I created a design system library in Figma for my team in order for us to keep our designs consistent and work efficiently. Beforehand, our screens had different icons, font sizes, patterns, etc. With styles in place and components created, our UI became consistent from screen to screen.

Landing Pages

Notion in Motion

Part of the challenge of this project was establishing an efficient workflow for the team. Our Project Manager, Paige (aka Pei), created a Notion page to host everything needed for onboarding. We used Notion for our tickets, sharing design feedback, etc.

Design Sprints

Each week, we would meet via Zoom for a weekly stand-up plus an hour of collaborative designing. We would use Slack in order to share our wireframes and brain storm ideas for different screens.

In Retrospective…

After each milestone, we would hold retros in order to talk about our work processes. I found it really helpful to communicate with the team and figure out how to work better together. My role as a leader shined through during these meetings being able to speak up about the hard stuff.

But What’s the MVP?!

Towards the middle of our project, my team and I were burnt out and discouraged. We had a never ending list of tickets and iterations. Half of what was asked of us by the stake-holder seemed like we were reinventing the wheel. I took the initiative to review the research and brief once again in order to clearly define what my team and I were to deliver. We came to a consensus on what was essential for the web app, and trimmed the fat so that we could focus on delivering work of quality.

Key Takeaways…

This project taught me about the importance of collaboration and team effort. Design doesn’t happen in a vacuum; It’s important to understand and empathize with others on your team in order to reach a common goal.