PITCH UP

Pitch Up reimagines the way SFU’s Arduino Club members can pitch crazy ideas, find inspiration, and find skilled people to build them together.

The goal of the application is to enhance project development by providing a platform for members to manage and plan their projects, whilst recruit new team members.

View final mockups here

View interactive prototype here

Role

UX Designer
Interface Designer
Visual Design
Branding
User Research

Team

Tobey Chen
Daria Ershova

Tools

Interviews
Participatory observation
Cultural Probes
Informances
Participatory Workshops
Adobe Suite
Flinto

Overview

Problem space

Faced with low engagement rates, lack of physical space, and declining attendance, the executives of SFU’s Arduino Club felt they were ready for an outside partner to help them reach their members at large. Working tightly with club members, we used various interactive design methods to establish rapport, define our design focus, and help the group manage their activities better.

View group identity analysis here

THE PROCESS

The team spent 13 weeks researching the identity of the club, speaking with its members and engaging them with cultural probes and participatory workshops. Through each stage of research, we identified key insights and opportunities, constantly adapting and revising our design focus for the group’s specific needs.

View personas here

View research summary slide here

CULTURAL PROBES

Cultural probes were one of the highlights of our design journey. We deployed 3 kits with 6 artifacts in each and asked members to engage with them over the course of 2 weeks. The feedback was enormous and not only allowed us to establish rapport with the club members, but also enabled us to move forward with our design explorations. It gave us insights into the sources of inspiration for the members as well as their daily struggles and achievements.

Find more about cultural probes here

PARTICIPATORY WORKSHOP

Participatory workshop was another method that we employed during our journey. It enabled us to bring the club members together and observe them solving problems in a collaborative and creative environment.

DESIGN EXPLORATIONS

After 10 weeks of exploration we decided to focus on creating a digital studio space that would facilitate the collective sharing of ideas, skills, and knowledge. As a result, we came up with 3 different concepts of how we can create an extension of the club into the digital space. This would not only eliminate the barriers between new and advanced members, but would help facilitate project development as well. Each of the concepts focused on a different area.

View three concepts and journey frameworks here

DOOGLE

Doogle represents a new way to ask questions: you can capture and annotate your notes, pictures and sketches. It also utilized the idea of crowdsourcing as a way to share knowledge between new and advanced members.

Pitch Up

This concept relied on visual project exploration and getting inspiration from someone else’s ideas.

Match Up

Match Up or, as it became known in a class, a Tinder for engineers, employed matchmaking as a way to find a partner to collaborate on a project.

STRATEGY

We got feedback from SFU Arduino Club and for the final prototype we combined the ideas of project pitching and matchmaking into one concept. As the UX and interface designer for the project, I decided to focus on providing three key functionalities that were instrumental to our group's identity and values.

KEY FEATURES

Pitching a project in a structured, but informal manner
Finding an interesting project to work on
Finding a team to work with or learn from

FLOW

For each functionality I focused on providing the flow that would be natural for the group. I aimed to make the digital experience simple and effortless for members of the club. By structuring and presenting timely information, the application is able to guide the user through the previously complicated and stressful process of finding a team member or project to work on one step at a time. The visual language provides consistency and clearly signifies where the user is at each moment of time.