Mutuo X: IT professionals team project platform
End-to-End mobile app Design
Stakeholders: Ellie(me), Sally(UX designer)
Duration: 2 months(part-time)
Tools: Figma, Office suite, Zoom
[Final design]
MutuoX is a platform that facilitates effective collaboration and project acquisition for IT professionals.
PROJECT INFO
How can we help IT professionals do collab-work effectively? We want to provide a place where they can successfully work with other team members. But also business owners can validate their idea at low cost.
PROJECT GOAL
RESEARCH
We analyzed to understand the landscape of freelance marketplaces and collaborative platforms. This analysis helped the design team identify best practices, industry trends, and potential gaps in the market that MutuoX could address.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
We found some great insights:
Although Upwork Validates and reviews freelancers, ensuring that clients are working with a trustworthy one, this is exclusively for solo freelancers.
Growmodo Provides examples or case studies of successful projects completed through the platform.
It's difficult to manage the list of projects and track their progress in the Tech fleet.
We conducted interviews with 5 IT professionals at varying levels. (2 developers, 1 project manager, and 2 designers)
We wanted to hear their pain points and needs to help them gain real-like experience of working on client projects in a multi-functional team.
The key findings were as follows:
USER INTERVIEW
By understanding users' needs, motivations, and challenges like personas, We could design and develop a platform that caters to their requirements.
We created two personas; James is a Junior visual designer who wants to change his job to UX designer. He struggles to build a network in the UX design industry.
The second persona is Tiana, a senior developer eager to gain mentoring experience but unsure how to find a great mentor.
USER PERSONAS
IDEATION
Our main goal was to collect projects first to gain freelance users. For that, we aimed to develop the essential features, such as the project list, setting a profile, creating a project, and applying.
This roadmap helped provide a clear direction for the design process, ensuring that the team was focused on developing the most valuable and impactful features within the given timeframe.
PRODUCT ROADMAP
How might we help users gain professional experience?
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How might we help users gain professional experience? 〰️
TASK FLOW
During the task flow, our main objective was to deliver a smooth and effortless user experience to the users.
For that, we created a scenario: Sung, a senior designer, is using our mobile app to find a side project and gain mentoring experience by completing the project.
DESIGN
We aimed to display the idea that when mutual efforts are combined, they can result in exponential success, symbolized by the letter X. So we created a multi-colored “X.” It presents a place where various types of people make a big impact.
BRANDING
The wireframes helped visualize the flow of the platform, the placement of key features, and the overall user experience. Also, we created a character, “Mutu.” He is visualized as “M.”
LOW-FI WIREFRAMES
Using the wireframes as a foundation, we created interactive prototypes that simulated the user interactions and provided a more realistic representation of the platform's functionality.
Flow1: Sign-up and apply to the project
Flow2: The user joined the project and wanted to check the dashboard and notifications.
PROTOTYPES
TESTING
We conducted a usability test by Figma with a sample group of 3 IT professionals to gather feedback and evaluate the usability of the designs.
USABILITY TEST
The tasks took 3-5mins to complete and went smoothly. They suggested making some minor adjustments to improve user interface and interaction.
The suggestion was to increase the size of the target delivery date text and incorporate visual aids to represent the project's progress. This would make it more noticeable and assist team members in keeping track of deadlines.
One of the user's suggestions was to include the profile, save icon, and search bar on the project list page, improving the user experience by making it easier to search for projects.
FINAL DESIGN
The design process outlined above ensured the UX design decisions were user-centered and data-driven.
MutuoX improved and refined its platform through an iterative process based on user feedback. As a result, the platform effectively addresses the needs of both IT professionals and business owners, promoting collaboration and project acquisition.
KEY LEARNINGS
We will focus on our next task, creating a search filter and review feature for our project. In addition, we will conduct further usability testing on the current version and make necessary design improvements through iteration.
NEXT STEPS