Minneapolis Tech hire
An initiative established to help close Minneapolis' workforce skills gap in tech by opening opportunities for diverse workers via access to tech training, support, and jobs.
Challenge
Identify a design strategy that proposes a way to more effectively engage key audience groups during Minneapolis Tech Month, a to-be annual effort whose goal is to increase awareness of the variety of vocational options within tech, especially among those underrepresented in the tech community.
Solution
Several multi touchpoint prototypes along with a video showcasing our persona and journey map, in order to tell the story of our thought processes and connect our prototypes to their real-life value.
KEY DELIVERABLES
System of prototypes:
Design strategy implementation plan:
Methods
Deep dive
Touchpoint strategy map
Personas
Journey mapping
Prototyping
Tools
Paper + pencil
Sketch
What
-client introduction, stakeholder interview
Why
-understand Tech Month's background and problem space
How
-talked to us about themselves and their initiative, what their goals are
What
-deep dive into methods of feedback and tracking data
Why
-gain a deeper understanding of client's problem space and existing methods, to inform our prototyping
How
-engaged in secondary research of existing documentation
What
-decided on an initial strategy statement
Why
-focus our insights and approach as a team
How
-based on the problem space, decided on a demographic user focus group
What
-created a physical visualization that shows how our prototypes will fit together
Why
-create a cohesive user experience that informs our team's decisions
How
-a touchpoint strategy map; visually combined our strategy statement, stages of the experience, and user goals/tasks for each touchpoint
What
-we created a persona, an Afro Latina woman named Chanel Martinz
Why
-to keep our team focused on the "user" goals
How
-referred back to our strategy statement, based off of experiences with afro latina community
Insight Gained
Properly labeling and grouping layers in Sketch might take a bit of extra time, but gosh darn is it worth it.
Story
While annotating my team's prototypes, I noticed that a teammate's pdf was missing part of the text and imagery I could see in her Sketch file. I consulted my team, but a probable cause didn't come to mind. So, I did a bit of digging in Sketch. Turns out, some of her layers weren't on their proper artboards. So when we exported her artboards to pdf, those layers weren't included.
Then while working on another teammate's prototype, I discovered that her labeling was inconsistent. Additionally, her groupings for each prototype's page either left several layers out or continued across pages, so that when I selected one page to drag to a new artboard, elements on another would also be selected. So before putting each page of her prototype on its own artboard to simplify exporting them to pdfs for client perusal, I had to consolidate her groupings.
While these issues were an easy enough fix, in the end I spent more time troubleshooting my teammates' Sketch files than actually annotating them. A bit frustrating, yes, but all in all it was a valuable learning experience for myself and the rest of my team.
worked together to create a decent presentation, and I worked on my prioritization of progress - adding detail later, ensure that I had the absolute basics first
-also worked on using tools properly
-worked out basic editing in the pdf viewer because those were the tools I was given
-later realized that I could simply ask for the Sketch files, which I did