My role here was to establish proper team structures and a new design system
I was design lead with 3 design interns in the team
Company
CliQup Social
Year
2023 - 2024
Deliverables
UX Research
UX Strategy
Design System
Tools
Miro
Figma
Google Forms
Mixpanel
Who was CliQup and why?
CLIQup is a social platform that solves the problem of loneliness through helping people find like-minded people to interact with, make plans together and attend real life meetings in small groups.
The challenge for this role at CLIQup was that they didn’t know they needed design leadership. There was some recognition from the CEO on the value of design, they had 4 UX interns working on different parts of the platform.
The goal for me was to:
- Bring in some structure and defined processes.
- Manage & improve design productivity, and
- Mentor design talent.
All this was a combined effort to improve design outcomes as we push to release v2 of the platform. I will dive into these in detail and the work that went into it.
Leading UX Research to improve the UX of new MVP platform
What was this important?
I was a user of CLIQup before joining the team, this made me aware of some niggling problems the first version of the app had. The CEO told me there was a new v3 in the works, and my first questions were:
How do we make sure the problems in v2 don’t show up in v3?
What kind of research has been done?
Little research had been done at the time. So I started out by planning usability tests on a prototype of the new app. The goal of the testing was to find out what works, and identify areas of improvement
We recruited about 9 participants combining internal stakeholders and users, had them test the prototype by completing some tasks. We got some very interesting results.
After the testing sessions, I then aggregated all the insights information and set up a workshop with everyone on the team, to analyse these results, and identify any trends.
We had a successful workshop where we highlighted these trends, and I created How Might We questions to help us think through these problems and brainstorm solutions.
I then came up with recommendations based on all our finding to inform our next design decisions and design direction.
Establishing a design system - planning, documentation and governance
We didn’t have any kind of structure in terms of how the designers worked. I first started with introducing use of a component library. Conducted an audit of all the components and gathered reusable elements into a library.
The next steps after this was to start putting together a design system, and also communicating with all the team members on how to use the system, plus more rules and guidelines around it.
Facilitating workshops to drive alignment on product initiatives
In our team meetings and design review sessions. Some questions are raised with no clear answers to them. It dawned on me that we needed to take an extra steps to define product requirements, breakdown user cases and document them.
This was one of such sessions where I setup a workshop and we did a breakdown for the CLIQup organiser platform. This helped us to redefine the business goal, identify priorities and map out a user flow. From henceforth, we had more clarity on the feature, and had conversations and decision making as product development progressed.
Reflections
The biggest takeaways at this stage for me was to see how much impact I had made within a short time with the team. Helping the team to set up processes, influence ways of working and improve designers productivity.
There’s a lot more work to be done, like implementing proper governance structures, improving UX routines and meetings, make more sense of quantitative data that has been collected so far on the platform, and try to make more impact through design.
