Summary
A time-sensitive microsite that promotes the youth of a beloved design festival. Rooted in the study of fundamental UXR and Graphic Design principles.
Context
Dutch Design Awards (DDA) is an event that celebrates excellence in design across various categories. The ceremony awards designers based on several categories, such as Product, Fashion, and Habitat.
My Role
I was in charge of leading the design direction by creating an cross-medium identity. Additionally, I led a time-sensitive UXR campaign and laid the fundamental foundations of our Figma prototype.
Preliminerary Research
I launched a 2-day UXR campaign to gauge pain points on the DDA website. The outreach was done in-person, Instagram, and on Discord and resulted in 12 in-person interviews and 8 online surveys.
Problem Discovery
Although a category existed for Young Designers on the DDA website, it was severely underrepresented and difficult to discover.
HMW Statement
How might we create a bespoke platform for Young Designers at the DDA that reduces friction between users and engages connection?
Information Gathering
I began with looking at the works of Bruce Mau and Ellen Lupton for our design identity. From there, I extrapolated design principles that could be referenced in my work.
Preliminary Iterations
A fundamental aspect of this project was the development of visual skills to flesh out an identity. In our brief, I was asked to create 100 posters to explore this skill. I decided to create over 370 to maximize the opportunity. Yeah... 370... in 2 weeks...
Design Refinements
After all that intense work… these 2 posters had the most potential. In the end, I consolidated them into our final direction.
Addressing Pain Point 1
Finally… Time to design on web. To address our first problem, I laid out the foundations of our microsite by developing a Design System. The principles were derived from design-adjacent websites on Framer and Webflow Gallery.
Web Principle 1
When brought to the ‘all nominees’ page, users can direct themselves to designers by hovering over the their row. The image appearing on the left gives a preview of the designers’ work and appearance.
Image appears on hover of relevant text
Web Principle 2
Before a user clicks on a year, they are presented a video clip of a project from each nominee of that year. Paired with the enlarged size during the hover, a call-to-action button is made.
Hover to enlarge content
Web Principle 3
Users are able to navigate easily back and forth between the Young Designers and Information about the category and Dutch Design Awards.
Click to switch to another subpage
Addressing Pain Point 2
The original user journey was long and tiresome. I consolidated it by reducing the number of steps from 6+ to 3.
Addressing Pain Point 3
After conducting more UX research, I found an aversion to large amounts of text. To mitigate this, I used a variety of different methods to convey information.
Solution
And here it is. A Figma prototype that shows the realization of our concept from 3 weeks ago. After an intense week, this is what we were able to come up with.
Reflection
Rapid iterating and asking, asking, asking questions were major skills I learned in this 3 week endeavour. However, it wasn't perfect. Looking back, I would like to place a larger emphasis on accessibility features, such as a screen-reader. Additionally, optimization for mobile would be a big consideration.
