Journey
Journey
Journey is a social media app where you can find a community of people who share a common interest with you – maybe a hobby, sport, skill or career. I was involved in developing a new feature: the resource hub, a page that centralizes all resources in the app so users can access them freely, see what’s trending and get recommendations.
Role: User Research, UX Design, UI Design
Tools: Figma, Zeplin
Team: Main designer
The project
When a user joins journey, they find a wide variety of resources connected to their passions that can help them along their way – be it someone’s post about secret skating spots, or your bestie sharing a link with the perfect guide on how to sew jeans. All of these resources used to be scattered around the app, making it difficult for users to access. The resource hub is a central page where users can find and search all resources in their community.
Defining the problem
For users to gain knowledge and improve on their passions/interest, they can access guides or find resources scattered through the community posts. These are only accessible via search tag, sparse and unorganized. Journey asked me to create a hub that would host all of a community's resources by:
1 - Broadening access to resources for users
2 - Reinforcing the community creator’s role within the hub
3 - Promoting participation in the community
Research and ideation
To start, I familiarized myself with Journey’s users by conducting short interviews and looking at past user data and creating personas (see above). Once I had an idea, I conducted a competitive analysis and started working on generating ideas with the help of the design team. After some brainstorming and sketching, I created a basic user flow (see below) to align stakeholders and start working on reaching the project goals.
The solution
There aren’t a lot of apps that use similar concepts to the resource hub, but most have some form of library. Following basic library UX designs, plus the existing design system for Journey, I created the hub. I focused on making it aesthetically appealing (as is characteristic of the rest of the app) and visually guiding the user through the space, while making sure that the architecture would fit user expectations. You can use the figma prototype here.
1 - Broadening access to resources for users
Access is the main goal for the resource hub. When discussing this feature, users mentioned that important information is constantly shared often in comments, posts and group chats –taking many forms, such as media, links or text– but it was difficult to keep track of. To alleviate this pain, I created a multilayered hub where all users can share and view all resources in the community, focusing on:
Effortless tagging and posting
Making resources easy to share is the first stepping stone. By iterating on the flow that previously “tagged” resources, users can now create more concrete posts to share with other community members.
Engaging and organized main page
To curb information overload, I created categories that can be managed by the community creator. The hub shows the most relevant topics and resources in a visually appealing interface.
Search bar and filters
By allowing users to search and use different filters, they can find the resources that best align with their needs quickly.
2 - Reinforcing the community creator role
Community creators are a driving force in the app, à la influencer. It is important that resources can be curated by the community creator in the background, but they also need to be at the forefront in order to make their presence stand out. When users can see that the resources they’re browsing have been considered by a reliable authority, they are able to trust the information and feel more confident. These are the main features I created to contribute to reinforcing the role of community creator:
Pinned resources
Creators have the ability to share the most relevant resources at the top of the hub, so users can quickly access the most reliable and significant sources related to their community interest.
Editor view
When entering this view, creators have the ability to organize, build and edit the hub, constantly improving the experience for the people in their community.
3 - Promoting participation in the community
As any social platform, Journey relies on their users to create content and contribute to enhance the experience for the whole community. The hub includes different features to make the contributing experience comfortable and rewarding.
Highlighting the users
Even though resources come from different origins, the hub always features the person who added that resource – giving them ownership of the knowledge and authority within the community.
Likes and comments
Engagement plays a big part in the participation of resources, as it affect the “upvote” algorithm and push certain resources to the forefront. Users know they are making an impact in the community when liking and commenting.
User testing
After working closely with the developers to implement a beta version of the feature, I created a user testing guide and led multiple qualitative testing sessions to evaluate the basic usability of it, as well as the overall concept. During testing, we uncovered multiple errors, bugs and other user experience problems that I got to fixing right away and are included in the final version that is now live in the app.
juditserral.design@gmail.com