Design Strategy
Prime Digital Academy
Prime Digital Academy is a technology school that offers courses in Software Development and User Experience Design. Prime needed a design strategy to address prospective students’ ability to self-assess their fit for Development and UX bootcamps.
The Problem
The Approach
We began by detailing the process perspective students go through to research Prime and to learn about Development and UX bootcamps. Using our findings, we created a design strategy for Prime that included alterations to some of their digital touch-points and the creation of a new UX Design workshop. Through these recommendations, our goal was to spread key information about the courses offered by Prime across many mediums and touch-points along a perspective student's journey.
Prime fields a huge number of inquiries about their courses. Questions are often focused on whether or not the perspective student has the skills needed to succeed at Prime. Perspective students frequently assume that Prime requires experience or background knowledge in, either UX or Development, to apply to their courses. This is not the case. The staff at Prime maintain that it is one's ability to collaborate, communicate, and adapt quickly that will allow a student to thrive.
Initial Research
Our team began by working to understand how perspective students research bootcamps. As we did this, we made sure to note where in their journey they experienced particularly stressful moments or encouraging moments. For example, we noted that many students cite their application interview with Prime’s staff as the moment they envisioned themselves within the Prime community. These interviews are done with Christy, the Academic Operations Manager, and Fred, the Director of Student Experience. Thus, we named the impact of these interviews the 'Fred and Christy effect'.
Prime has a lean staff and it wasn’t feasible to ask more of Christy and Fred. So moving forward, our design strategy was to introduce the positive impact they have had on perspective students in others ways. We determined that some of Prime’s online presence did not reflect the strong sense of community at Prime. This was evident in the visual aesthetic and the content of their website and online ads. The rest of my team set out to introduce the Fred and Christy effect into Prime’s online presence.
UX Design Workshop
The aspect of our recommendations that I focused on was a prototype of a UX workshop. This would be modeled after the current HTML/CSS workshop at Prime, though it will have some changes in order to address the ambiguity/malleability of UX work in comparison to coding. The prototype took the form of a storyboard that follows a student’s journey from the Prime website, to getting in contact with the staff at Prime, and finally coming to a workshop at Prime.
My challenge moving forward was to work out how the workshop would be designed to effectively answer questions about UX work and to showcase Prime’s community. It needed to work within Prime’s current resources and also have meaning for perspective students.
Design Strategy Recommendations
Next, we brought our prototypes together and determined their place in our design strategy. Through critique and reflection, we highlighted areas within our plan that may have been confusing to the client during our presentation to them. We worked to build a more united concept in order to address that confusion. Afterwards, I continued to expand on the storyboards for the workshop to ensure their value within the overall design strategy.
The project posed many challenges including, staying focused in times of uncertainty, creating a cohesive body of prototypes to fulfill the design strategy and address the client’s problem, and making sure we were being productive within our time constraints.
Using a dynamic Prezi presentation, we demonstrated our recommendations to the client. This presentation format allowed us to show where in the user’s journey each proposed feature would be implemented. Keeping the client oriented within the problem space proved to be very effective and allowed us to have a much deeper conversation about the value and details of each of our recommendations.
