Found Her Lab - Led By Her
Challenge : leading a full remote project
Led By Her iis a charitable organisation to help the women reinsertion through entrepreneurship. For this reason, stakeholders wanted to lauch a new platform « Found her Lab » to connect women entrepreneurs with experts to help them in their projects.
My goal was to think about new ways of use this plateform, new graphic guidelines and define new UI.
The goal of the project was to build a new plateform for women which is attractive, which give confidence and easy to use.
Found her lab is a project shared between Paris, Nantes, Bordeaux. The challenge was to conduct the project remotely.
5 months (Jan. 2018 - May 2018)
UX designer / Lead UI designer
- 1 Business Owner
- 1 Product Manager
- 1 UX designer
- 2 UI designers
- 1 frontend developer
- 3 Developers
Design question
How to encourage women to use the service ?
User research
Working for an charitable organisation is a very different job than working for company. I need to adapt myself and think in terms of costs.
The question was : which insights do I need for my remote user research?
First, I needed to interview users about the process to point their feelings about that project and in which context they will interact with the website.
During the initial discovery phase, Led By Her helped set up 1-1 interview sessions with their members. I interviewed people of age groups between 27-48 years, with diverse backgrounds to understand their approach to use Found Her Lab plateform.
I split my user interview in 3 parts :
- Gathering opinions about the project
- Gathering informations about users goals
- Gathering informations about users behavior
About the project
Good feelings about the project. Starting a new business adventure means new issues. In fact, women have different issues :
- Business strategy & development
- Communication & Marketing
- Accounting, law and taxation
- Personal development
- Founding
- Human resources
They don’t always know where to find an answer and this project is a way for them to benefit from expert advices.
About users goals
The goal was to have a successful research tool and easily get in touch with experts. Some of them talk about to have suggestions based on what they looked for.
About users behavior :
Mostly, the future plateform needed to be accessible by phone, tablet and desktop.
Persona & Experience map
In order to make a real valuable proposition in creating a shared reference framework around the user experience, I created 3 personas with an experience map each. The goal is to build an organizational knowledge of the behaviors and needs of users across different devices.
Sketches & Wireframes
Now I get enough datas to create my first proposal, I begun a sketch draw to organize my ideas and userflows. I presented my wireframes to users during a focus group, on which I iterated.
Design persona
I wanted a strong personality for this website. I wanted it really impacting and that women identified themselves in this design. So I used the « design persona » method from Aaron Walter. In his book emotional design, Aaron Walter said: « If your website were a person, who would it be?… Following a similar structure as a user persona, you can flesh out the personality of your design by creating a design persona ». So I did my design persona.
Graphic design
Led By Her already had graphic guidelines, so to be coherent, I needed to use thoses guidelines.
Colors
Our primary palette is comprised of purple, pink and neutral colors.
Typeface
I almost exclusively used Open Sans across the website as indicated by the guidelines.
2 proposals
I presented 2 different graphic orientations : the first one with illustrations, second one with photographies. Why this choice ? Because stakeholders let me hand free on graphic design, only the information I got was : « It must be disruptive ». I knew that Led By Her website was build on photographies and I had the feeling that the « It must be disruptive » sentence means « It must be original as the website we already have ».
First proposal
I proposed a set of illustrations to have a less formal render, a more up-to-date website. This proposal was not the chosen one.
Second proposal
This is the choosen one.
Frontend development
The plateform was developed by teams in Paris and unfortunately I couldn’t have a look on what was implemented. You can see the website here : https://foundherlab.com/
Project Learnings
For remote projects coordination is the key
When you’re working with 2 teams which are in different places, coordination is the key to be ok on what everyone needs, what everyone knows and on what’s going on next you finished your job. In fact, the pain point for me was the frontend development result : I was staffed on a new project and didn’t have time to check what has been online. So some graphic layouts are not exactly as they are on my mockups.
Anticipate
The 2 proposals of the homepage I made was essential to know on what graphic direction stakeholders wanted their project. So once they choose, I could really continue to work on the graphic UI.