End-to-end design of an academic support platform for a coding bootcamp
Overview
G-Code is a non-profit that helps under-employed Black, Brown, Indigenous women and non-binary people break into tech through an online coding course. As part of the effort to improve student retention and graduation rate, my team helped G-Code build an online learning community and office hours scheduling platform. As the only designer on the team, I did the end-to-end design and the project was shipped in 2023.
My Role
Team
Project Type
Design Timeline
Solo Product Design
User Research
Design Systems
Branding
1 Product Manager
1 Tech Lead
4 Front-End Engineers
6 Back-End Engineers
Community project for a local non-profit
Shipped
3 Months, Fall 2022
"Working with Ariya was an amazing experience. She was diligent in researching what our exact needs were and conceptualized a product even beyond our imagination. Her exceptional talent for design, combined with a deep understanding of user experience, has resulted in a beautifully crafted prototype that once built will exceed our expectations. The prototype has already received overwhelmingly positive feedback from our testers and we credit this success to Ariya's commitment to excellence. We highly recommend Ariya for any app design project and look forward to collaborating with her in the future."
"It has been great working with Ariya. Her initial mock-ups and designs have always been more than enough to get a conversation started, and her follow-up revisions have always taken my feedback into consideration in tasteful and refined ways. She's even quick with Figma to make changes to mock-ups on the fly as we discuss them so that we can see what we think about a decision. Ariya has been pro-active and consistent about reaching out to me for feedback. I'm confident our process will result in a better product that will improve our Fellows' learning experience."
Competitive Analysis + The Gap
Kids love metaphors and stories, and they can be windows to harder conversations
I looked at existing tools for play therapy, toys for learning about emotions, and popular toys for preschooler. From the product reviews, I learned about how parents and therapists used them, and I found that cartoon faces and stories were really effective for getting kids to label feelings and talk about how they feel in certain situations! However, parents are frustrated by the lack of customizable expressions on these toys, and that popular motor toys have little educational value.
"My child clients immediately gravitated toward using the peg dolls to identify their feelings. The figures are easy for the child to project their feelings, name their feelings and describe the situation that triggers the feeling." -- Online Product Review