We were approached by Utopicode, seeking to generate a tech talent community which needs to look & feel like a happy place for developers. The central part of their value proposition relies on how they attract and engage with tech talent. They constantly attract tech talent and engage by serving them and with what they like. They need to feel the urge to be a part of the community, find value in being a part of UTOPIC0DE, and want to come back daily. The community needs to turn from junior to senior tech talent—improve English level, soft skills, hard skills and coded hours. Their main objectives were as follows: Design a new social community feature that will allow our users to connect engagingly through our Platform To explore how this space will be monitored to ensure it is safe from the perspective of a moderator who might communicate in it.  To explore how to facilitate mentoring through these features in either setting people up or building out a way for mentors/mentees to be connected through the platform. After meeting our clients and understanding what deliverables we needed to achieve by the end of the three weeks, we started with the discovery phase of the double diamond process. Utopicode gave us a list of potential interviewees. At first, we created a screening survey, which enabled us to gather quantitative data; on the other hand, we could send individual interview invitations to those who match our target developers. 

After sending numerous interview invites after the screening survey, we need help to get responses, especially from our target group of Latin Americans. Not finding enough user interviews could lead to a massive delay in the project management perspective. While the clock is ticking, we expanded our interviewees’ demographic worldwide. By expanding the demographic, we managed to get 11 interviews in total with both junior and senior developers from across the globe. Our main insights, which informed the development of the community features were divided into five key aspects:

A Prioritisation Matrix gave structure to this sea of ideas — highlighting the best and most feasible solutions. We picked five solutions that approached the problem from different angles:

When we as a team try to navigate to the existing site, we found that some of the categories are fell into groups that don’t match our expectation, that’s why conducted a close card sort exercise with 15 users. It showed clearly that mentorship is something that users do not associate with a community platform but events, forums and blogs they would.

Having the new site map ready, we begin to dive into the low fidelity prototype, we conduct 5 user testing on each version and iterate our design.  In our first wireframe, we created two task flows: browsing the forum and create blogs. It is always interesting to view the problem as a team, while we are all agree on the solution, but we have different layout ideas and varies details.  As a team member with graphic design background, I tried not to dominate in this process, as we are all learning something new, as I tried to unlearn what’s in me and let the process guide us.  And the we do get more insights and learn more from the process.

Once we tested the mid fidelity for the second time we noticed that the onboarding process where the “Cody” avatar is introduced caused confusion. We needed to give users more instructions and coach marks on this part of the process.  4/5 users questioned that once they followed a profile or commented on a thread they would like to receive notifications or alerts on their profile.

Understand that we did a numerous of user interviews, and the time we spent are slightly longer than expected, we have so missing pieces to further explore on the insights we have, especially on the junior developer persona Carlos,  we could further validate the design with junior developers by more user testing with this target group, as well as another design studio specify to this persona.

We would like to test and fine tune the onboarding process. We want to make sure the flow makes sense, all the elements work and that users are motivated to complete their profiles, but also to be sure we’re capturing as much data we can from each user to inform UtopiC0de’s recruitment team of everything they need.

We would also want to make sure we are testing the high fidelity prototype in its entirety with UtopiC0de’s target Latin American audience. However, this is something we have struggled with as a team due to the language barrier and our limited capability in Spanish, and we are aware that only 1% of Utopic0de’s users access the site in English.  We also want to make sure that we aren’t missing anything of cultural significance in Latin America because we’ve tested with a wider range of nationalities. 

Explore how we could categorise the level of a developer: if they are junior, mid level or senior, to allow more tailored content, and how this content could be gated depending on level to make sure we don’t have this saturation issue outlined in the primary persona and problem statement; Senior Devs have access to Senior Dev only forums for example. We are aware, however, that this differentiation isn’t straightforward and may present a challenge.

We’d like to explore the viability of the Machine Learning functionality within the forum because we believe this would be the key to making Utopic0de’s community offering stand out. 

Breaking the language barrier - as a Hong Konger, English is not my first language. In this project, our initial target group is Latin American, while some of the interviewees' mother languages are Spanish. Which makes me and my teammates feel the same. Yet after conducting interviews with them, I realised no matter how crappy my language is, the more willing I want to communicate, the easier I find to connect with my interviewees. 

Assumptions are a coin with two sides -  as an experienced graphic designer, I have many assumptions based on my work experience. On one side, it helps the team develop wireframes and designs quickly. On the other hand, it needs extra work to validate my design decisions.

Utilise the five whys - while running user interviews and tests, it is interesting to ask “why” on each comment they speak, as the reason behind the good and bad are not the same as you think, and it happens often.

Unlearn to learn - holding your dignity from your experience will stop you from absorbing something new like a sponge soaked with water. In the middle of the design process, I felt extremely uncomfortable as we gathered a lot of data and were unsure what these insights would take us. 

Devil is in the details – even if you think you are on the same page with your teammates, think again. As you will learn, we all have different ideas on every detail, and we communicated much as a team to minimise our difference.