gener8tor
Overview
gener8tor is a startup accelerator and venture capital firm with programs spanning across the globe. Their goal is to educate individuals and teams on entrepreneurship in a wide variety of markets.
gener8tor needed to increase design efforts on their internal software dashboard that the engineering team was building. The dashboard was going to be used as a one-stop shop for all programs, stakeholders, and knowledge for all products. We found that, for design purposes, creating a design system in Figma was the most effective way forward.
Discovery
When getting involved with this project, it was about 20% complete. I needed to become familiar with the intricacies of the system and current design. The project was not fully flushed out, so I also needed to understand where I could fill the gaps. I spent many hours with the undeveloped Figma system.
Before we began designing, the engineering lead wanted to further understand how the bare bones prototype landed with users. We decided to conduct user interviews to predict future failures in the dashboard. The interview subjects were current employees from each product line because they are the subject matter experts.
At the time, conducting user interviews so early felt out of order, but it allowed me to fully realize the problem that the dashboard is addressing. The interviews also gave us insights on how to proceed.
Delivery
We decided that we should create reusable components for engineers to copy and paste code for each major dashboard section. Doing so allowed us to swiftly create the necessary pieces for the rest of the dashboard. The brand elements were already created, which also made the creation of components simpler.
The initial components were created in Figma, so we continued the work there.
After designing most of the dashboard components, we conducted user testing with the same set of employees from the initial interviews and another set of employees from similar product lines.
From these tests, at a high-level, the users informed us that the dashboard was going to be such a time-saver but would also come with a huge learning curve, which led us to the next step.
Instead of iterating the product based on user testing, we decided to conduct pilot testing to implement the first phase of the project. Then, after gaining further insight, we could iterate the product.
Results
Our team was able to create the design system in Figma, so that the engineers could develop the dashboard in its entirety. Unfortunately, the project and engineering lead left the company before our team could finish developing the dashboard, and the company decided not to continue development.
