My UX Portfolio Presentation | Hired at Amazon and IBM (Springboard Graduate)
Summary
TLDRSharon, a third-year student at Parsons School of Design, shares her UX presentation that secured her offers from Amazon and IBM. She discusses her accountability app for college students, highlighting the project's background, research, and design process. Sharon emphasizes the importance of accountability in achieving personal goals, detailing user interviews, competitive analysis, and iterative design improvements. She also provides tips for creating an effective UX presentation, including storytelling, conciseness, and visual clarity.
Takeaways
- 🎓 The presenter, Sharon, is a third-year undergraduate student at Parsons School of Design.
- 📚 The first project presented is an accountability app for college students, highlighting a gap between achieving academic and personal goals.
- 🔍 Sharon conducted white paper research on goal setting, motivation, and the psychology behind it, discovering that public commitments and accountability partners significantly increase the likelihood of achieving goals.
- 📊 A competitive analysis of existing productivity apps revealed a lack of accountability features, which users found important for goal achievement.
- 🗣️ Through interviews with eight students, Sharon identified key themes of community, motivation, and performance as crucial for accountability.
- 📈 The app design process involved multiple iterations, with significant changes based on user feedback, including removing bottom navigation and incorporating a broadcast feed for social proof and engagement.
- 👥 The app emphasizes the importance of having accountability partners to provide extrinsic motivation and avoid social consequences of not achieving goals.
- 📅 The app design includes features for tracking, managing, and executing goals, with customization options to cater to the college student's schedule and preferences.
- 📝 Users are required to provide evidence of goal completion, which is shared in an accountability feed, ensuring commitment and transparency.
- 🛠 The design system and style guide were carefully considered, with a focus on color psychology and UI consistency, moving from a gradient to a flat design for better readability and accessibility.
- 💡 Sharon acknowledges the importance of designing with intentionality and the value of continuous improvement through feedback, as well as considering WCAG standards for accessibility in future projects.
Q & A
What is the main topic of Sharon's UX presentation?
-The main topic of Sharon's UX presentation is about her experience creating a presentation that led to UX design offers from Amazon and IBM, focusing on an accountability app for college students.
What is the purpose of the accountability app Sharon designed?
-The purpose of the accountability app is to help college students achieve their personal goals as successfully as their academic goals by incorporating an accountability partner and a social media-like feed to post evidence of goal completion.
What inspired Sharon to focus on personal goal achievement in her project?
-Sharon was inspired to focus on personal goal achievement after noticing a disconnect between how college students persevere with academic goals versus personal goals, with the latter often not being achieved.
What research methods did Sharon use to understand the problem of personal goal achievement among college students?
-Sharon used white paper research, competitive analysis of popular goal-setting apps, and interviews with eight students across various majors to gather insights into why students struggle with personal goal achievement.
What was the key statistic Sharon found during her research that influenced her design?
-Sharon found a statistic from the American Society of Training and Development stating that people are 65% likely to meet a goal after making it public, but this success rate increases to 95% when they have a specific accountability partner.
How did Sharon approach the design of the app to ensure it met the needs of her target audience?
-Sharon iterated the design over four weeks, making four major improvements based on feedback from student users. She focused on simplifying navigation, using a broadcast feed for posting goal evidence, accommodating habit-like goals, and providing a guided onboarding experience.
What design elements did Sharon consider in creating the app's interface?
-Sharon considered color psychology, with orange symbolizing motivation, and created a design system for consistency. She also moved from a gradient to a flat design to improve readability and accessibility.
What was the significance of the 'accountability feed' feature in Sharon's app design?
-The 'accountability feed' is a social media-like feature where users can post evidence of their goal completion, which encourages better behavior and public accountability, increasing the likelihood of achieving goals.
How did Sharon address the issue of flexibility in goal setting within her app?
-Sharon included features that allowed users to push back deadlines or skip goals, providing flexibility that was important to her student testers who might have unexpected circumstances arise.
What advice does Sharon give for creating an effective UX presentation?
-Sharon advises to focus on storytelling, keep the presentation structure clean and not overloaded with information, and to design with intentionality. She also emphasizes the importance of feedback and continuous improvement.
What was Sharon's experience with Springboard, and how did it contribute to her success?
-Sharon took Springboard during her gap year, which allowed her to create the UX design project that led to offers from Amazon and IBM. She credits Springboard for helping her develop her skills and build her portfolio.
Outlines
🎓 UX Design Presentation Insights
Sharon, a third-year undergraduate at Parsons School of Design, introduces her UX presentation that secured her design offers from Amazon and IBM. She emphasizes the uniqueness of individual presentations and shares her process, starting with a disclaimer about the lack of a one-size-fits-all template. The presentation dives into her personal projects, including an accountability app for college students, developed over 12 weeks during a bootcamp with Springboard. Sharon discusses the initial problem discovery, highlighting the disparity between students' achievements in academic versus personal goals. She conducted white paper research on goal setting psychology and found that making goals public or having an accountability partner significantly increases the likelihood of achieving them. A competitive analysis of popular apps revealed a lack of effective accountability features. User interviews with eight students across various majors provided insights into goal setting challenges, leading to affinity mapping that identified themes of community, motivation, and performance. The app design process involved multiple iterations based on feedback, focusing on accountability features like accountability partners, a broadcast feed for posting goal evidence, and a guided onboarding experience. Sharon concludes with a reflection on her presentation skills and an offer for viewers to use her discount code for Springboard's UX design courses.
🔍 Deep Dive into User Research and Design Iteration
This section delves deeper into Sharon's user research process and the iterative design approach she took to develop the accountability app. She details the importance of understanding the user's journey and the role of accountability in achieving goals. Sharon found that without consequences, motivation to achieve personal goals often declines. Through interviews, she gathered insights that informed the design, focusing on community, motivation, and performance as interconnected themes that foster accountability. The design process included exploring different directions, from augmented reality to a simple smartphone app, and ultimately deciding on an app due to accessibility and effectiveness. Sharon iterated the app design over four weeks, making significant improvements such as removing bottom navigation for a more natural user flow, switching to a broadcast feed for social media-like engagement, recognizing the preference for habit-like goals over milestone goals, and implementing a guided onboarding experience. She also discusses the importance of considering edge cases like deadline extensions and skipped goals to provide flexibility.
🛠️ Finalizing the App Design and Reflecting on the Process
In this paragraph, Sharon outlines the final design elements of the accountability app. She discusses the inclusion of accountability partners to provide extrinsic motivation and social consequences, a feature for tracking and managing goals with customizable parameters, and an evidence submission system to ensure commitment. The app also considers flexibility with features for pushing back deadlines or skipping goals. Sharon emphasizes the importance of design with intentionality, creating a design system and style guide that considers color psychology and UI accessibility. She reflects on the project, noting areas for improvement such as exploring additional scheduling options, incorporating monetary consequences, and further considering WCAG standards for accessibility. She concludes by reiterating the importance of designing with intentionality and the lessons learned from the project.
📑 Presentation Structure and Call for Feedback
The final paragraph focuses on the structure of Sharon's presentation and her openness to feedback. She reviews her storytelling approach, emphasizing the personal interest in the project prompt and the importance of conciseness and clarity in presentation. Sharon suggests improvements such as simplifying slide content to enhance understanding and using screen sharing to demonstrate prototype interactions more effectively. She expresses gratitude to Springboard for their role in her UX design journey and offers a discount code for potential students. Sharon also provides a tutorial on how to structure presentations using Google Slides, discussing presenter view setup, speaker notes placement, and visual reuse from her Figma designs. She concludes by inviting viewers to share their suggestions for improvement and thanking them for their engagement.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡UX Presentation
💡Accountability App
💡Personal Goals
💡White Paper Research
💡Competitive Analysis
💡Affinity Mapping
💡User Persona
💡Iterative Design
💡UI/UX Design
💡Accessibility
💡Prototyping
💡Feedback
Highlights
Sharon's UX presentation led to offers from Amazon and IBM, showcasing its effectiveness.
No one-size-fits-all template for presentations; Sharon's is shared for transparency and learning.
Sharon is a third-year undergraduate student at Parsons School of Design.
The first project is an accountability app for college students, addressing the gap between academic and personal goal achievements.
White paper research delves into psychology of goal setting and motivation.
A statistic reveals that public goal setting increases the likelihood of success dramatically.
Competitive analysis of popular apps shows a lack of accountability features.
User interviews reveal insights into why personal goals are often not achieved.
Affinity mapping organizes data into themes of community, motivation, and performance.
Accountability is key for goal achievement, with consequences playing a significant role.
The design process involved exploring different directions, including AR and VR, before settling on a smartphone app.
Iterative design improvements were made based on user feedback over four weeks.
Design solutions include accountability partners, goal tracking, and evidence submission.
Edge cases like deadline extensions and skipped goals were considered for flexibility.
A design system and style guide were created with considerations for color psychology and UI consistency.
UI design evolved from a gradient to a flat design for better readability and accessibility.
Sharon reflects on the importance of designing with intentionality and the lessons learned from the project.
The second project is under NDA and cannot be publicly shared, but the process is similar to the first.
Sharon offers a discount code 'sharonkim' for Springboard's UX design courses and shares a tutorial on structuring DSLR.
Presentation tips include storytelling, conciseness, clean structure, and effective use of visuals.
Sharon emphasizes the importance of feedback and continuous improvement in the design process.
Transcripts
this is the exact ux presentation that
i've shown to both amazon ibm that gave
me ux design offers afterwards so a
really quick disclaimer i feel there is
no template for creating a presentation
everyone's is going to look different
and yours does not have to look like
mine but for the sake of transparency i
really do hope that my presentation
things that i've done my mistakes could
help you within your presentation as
well so without further ado i'm going to
open my google slides and let's jump
straight into the video
hi my name's sharon i'm a third year
undergraduate student at parsons school
of design and for the two projects i'd
like to show you today the first is an
accountability app for college students
and to give some background this was a
solo project done over the span of 12
weeks it was completed at a bootcamp
over my gap year called springboard and
they allowed us to create this project
on any project prompt of our choice
so going back to the initial problem
discovery as a college student i've
noticed how many of my peers and i were
able to persevere towards our academic
pursuits we have say a really hard
project due the next week we might
struggle a lot with it but we always
manage to power through maybe pull a few
all-nighters in order to get that
project done by that deadline yet on the
other hand if my friends would tell
themselves hey sharon i want to wake up
earlier and set more personal goals it
usually never ends up happening or
succeeding so this sparked the question
in me
of why was there this disconnect between
achieving our academic goals versus our
personal goals
more specifically the problem was
college students failed to accomplish
their personal goals as successfully as
their academic goals
so i'm really passionate about personal
development everything and before going
into specifically this problem before
touching the visual elements of design i
started off with white paper research i
wanted to first dive into the psychology
of goal setting motivation and the
mindset needed and during this research
i stumbled upon a really interesting
statistic from the american society of
training and development
and this statistic was
people are 65 percent likely to meet a
goal after making that goal public but
their chances of success increase to 95
percent when they have a specific
accountability partner to report to
personally i have never heard about this
before and although i thought it was
super interesting i still just wanted to
keep this in the back of my mind while i
did other research and expand my horizon
so then moving on since the space is
more you know goal setting and of
productivity i believe it is still a
pretty saturated space so i also
conducted a competitive analysis of the
four most popular apps within that space
to see what was working or what could be
improved and how i can reflect that
within my own design and with that i
found these four apps
overall i found that this competition
had little to no aspect of this
accountability to help the user achieve
their goals
stick the second most app from the left
had the most accountability and
accountability partners integrated
however due to really bad ui it was
overall just reviewed really poorly and
it ranked pretty low on the app store
but overall looking at the reviews of
all these apps users state that they can
flake on their goals due to not enough
pressure they still they still didn't
feel held down enough towards achieving
their goals
and although i saw from my competitive
analysis and white paper research that
accountability was important i wanted to
hear firsthand my target audience's
experiences to cater the final product
towards their needs i wanted to hear it
from the user themselves
so with eight students across a variety
of majors engineering design fashion i
asked them questions below to find some
trends on why they failed at some goals
versus others questions like tell me
about the last school you set what
motivated you to start in the first
place what was the most difficult part
of trying to achieve your goal and most
importantly tell me you did have to do
something difficult as a goal but you
yet pushed through and accomplished it
and with these insights i organized all
my data through affinity mapping i took
their quotes and put it together within
an affinity map trying to find like
trends together eventually forming nine
main insights and three main themes
so what did i find
and based on the trends in my affinity
map three major themes of community
motivation and and performance stood out
and then when i took a step back and
thought about how these major themes
also connect together i realize they
work with each other to promote this
aspect of accountability
if you're within a community you have a
more positive environment to encourage
you towards those goals it increases
then your motivation and hence your
performance
but within this aspect of overarching
accountability more specifically i found
that my interviewees were three times
more likely to succeed when there was
indeed this accountability for their
goals
i've noticed how if there's no real pain
or consequence associated with not
achieving their goal as was the case in
previous apps they used motivation to
continue ceased to exist
and even when mapping out the journey of
this college student user their process
for going about a goal went like they
first start they're very motivated they
have a lot of intrinsic motivation
saying this time is going to be
different then they end up trying maybe
they're successful for a few days or a
few weeks but eventually that internal
motivation
does seem to wane and they eventually
don't feel like it anymore
and usually it's at that point
that they get stuck
so this compared to their academic goals
they too ultimately don't feel like
anymore they don't want to finish that
paper but what was the difference
and the difference was there was a
consequence if yeah if i don't wake up
earlier nothing bad is going to happen
but if i don't finish my paper i am
going to get a bad grade i'm going to
feel maybe feel this class something bad
they don't want to happen so most of
that accountability was due to that sort
of social or whatever type of pain or
consequence
so now overall i had a better
understanding of my user my persona they
like to set goals but it's hard to stay
consistent with those goals due to a
lack of that accountability within that
conflict with that within that
conflicting stage
so overall this became my question for
design how might we make college
students feel more responsible and
accountable for their personal goals
so now i'm moving forward to design
at first when approaching the design
aspect i spent actually two weeks trying
to play with three different directions
not even just um in app interface but
even augmented reality virtual reality
and also the absolution
however upon thinking about the effects
of each i realized that through testing
and talking to my users on a daily basis
using either augmented or virtual
reality through say accountability
classes that i've done that was an idea
or an augmented reality mirror to help
visualize our goals might be more of a
hassle and not as accessible versus the
bene versus the benefits of it just
being an absolution the same effects
could be achieved through a simple
smartphone app hence i stuck to an app
for the final solution platform
and this just to give you an idea here
was the extent of how i tried going with
accountability glasses
but upon feedback this seemed a little
bit to george orwell 1984 of like
monitoring what they were doing so i
totally scratched that idea then to
determine the flows for this app design
i asked myself well what is the main
point of this app what is the easiest
way to get the user there
well the overall goal is you set a goal
then you achieve it through
accountability and do then it would also
make sense to follow up with that goal
and manage your goals perhaps
and upon constant testing and
explorations of various flows towards
the main app design
i continually iterated this design over
the span of four weeks with four major
improvements based on various feedback
from eight of my student users
the first major improvement was removal
of the bottom navigation the home page
itself became the navigation towards
major parts of the app and the reason
why that is because based on mentor
feedback letting the user naturally flow
to the other parts of the app seemed to
be a better fit and at first i desired a
bottom navigation tab to allow ease of
adaption for the user but then again if
the main point of the app is to
help them get to you know accomplishing
their goals and setting evidence for
their goals later on which it might just
be easier to cut out the tabs and go
straight straight to the main task of
the app
secondly is switching to a broadcast
feed so overall the way this app works
is that you choose an accountability
partner you tell them your goals and
then you have to send evidence for your
goals and at first the medium i wanted
to send this evidence to was through
like was through a chat room however
based on feedback having a more social
media-like feed to
post your evidence encourages better
behavior at it as it appears more public
than a private chat also if it was like
just a chat room why not just use
imessage instead it seemed a little too
you know not as special as it could be
for this app design
plus switching it to more the broadcast
social media like feed allows instant
gratification of likes and comments to
encourage further use
the third major improvement is realizing
how students desire habit-like goals
instead of instead of these major
milestone-like goals
before receiving feedback i was first
under the impression that students would
like to set major goals like you know
they also want to start a youtube
channel or like do this really cool side
project when in reality they told me
that they they're looking to have more
consistency with repetitive goals such
as waking up on time or drinking more
water
and lastly the fourth major improvement
was a guided onboarding experience so
previously when they first download this
app i added some nice ui illustrations
however upon speaking with my mentor it
was instead useful to have more low
fidelity ui that is indicative of how
the app would work although the left
hand illustrations are a lot prettier
the right hand side is more functional
and useful so that was the fourth major
change
and then upon all this iteration and
feedback to move on to what this final
solution and designs were
first is having accountability partners
as i mentioned before within my
whitepaper research you can increase
your chances of accomplishment up to 95
when you have a specific accountability
partner they provide a source of
extrinsic motivation to not get caught
in the conflicting stage of the user
journey it also it prompts the user to
want to avoid social consequences of not
completing that goal
secondly to cater to the second flow
here is where you can track manage and
execute all your goals at once
to cater specifically towards the
college student persona there is a
schedule depending on the day to help
cater towards your classes and you can
also customize and set different
parameters for each goal as well
and lastly and this is the most
important part of the app is not only do
you set a goal and have an
accountability partner but you have to
send evidence and engage with that
accountability partner you send a proof
of completion of your goals and this
proof of evidence makes sure you lock
down your commitments instead of
possibly you know
you you just say that you've done it
when in reality you don't and you don't
have anything to show for it you can see
all of this within a larger
accountability feed which you see on the
right hand side
and lastly the fourth major design of of
this app is considering the edge cases
of maybe you want to push back a
deadline or skipping a goal showed up to
be very mandatory as many of my student
testers wanted that extra flexibility
say if things did come up yeah you know
i had a super late night yesterday like
my car broke down and i just couldn't
really do this on time so having a bit
more flexibility was something
that was integral to the design of this
app
then to touch upon the design system and
the style guide that i've created
i overall considered the color
psychology and i found that orange
symbolized the color of motivation hence
that became my primary color plus for
the actual app interface i looked at my
competitors to see how they formatted
their ui how did they structure the um
their interface for the home screen
so considering all these into
perspective i created a bunch of
different sketches and created this
design system to stay consistent and use
that within my own app design
and lastly to note about the ui design i
also did change it from first a gradient
to more flat design as i realize there
are very little apps that use more of a
gradient it could cause readability
accessibility issues and also the
removal of the orange gradient better
adhere to fit wcag standards
now looking back on this project if i
had more time i would really like to
explore more the boundaries of
scheduling more opportunities for
college students see different ways to
increase accountability maybe not just
social consequences of you know like you
between you and your accountability
partner but maybe there's a slight
monetary consequence as well or even add
flexibility towards different types of
students maybe there are students who
may not like habit-like goals but maybe
they do want more milestone like goals
for perhaps more larger goal they set
for themselves
plus i would also like to consider wcag
standards more in terms of the
accessibility of the design as well and
overall the main takeaway and moving
forward and what i might do differently
is remember to always design with
intentionality and working fully through
this project taught me the importance of
doing that and thinking about every
element of the project and how it
ultimately would all come together to
contribute to the end result
so that was a major case study that i
presented the second project is more of
an nda project non-disclosure agreement
so i can't publicly show that here
however i will just skip through it
really quickly to give you a general
sense of
of the flow but it's pretty similar you
have the
you have the main page you go into some
brief details of like who your team was
what your role was tools a general
description and same thing of
doing the the storytelling of having the
storytelling what you've done what has
already been done and go through that
same similar process
so taking a look back at my presentation
i think what i've done well was that
storytelling aspect of why we're even
personally interested in doing that
project prompt in the first place you
know if it's not say like a company type
of project um however i think i could
yeah i think i could have just made some
parts a little bit more concise and not
seem as rambly um i want to know what
you guys think i'm always open to
feedback as well and also making the
presentation structure really clean do
not cram it with information and milster
should be like two to three sentences or
bullet points per slide and you just
flush out that visual sort of cue with
your words within the presentation one
last thing this was a major i don't want
to say a mistake but improvement that i
noticed i should work on after i did
these interviews was i was speaking to
one of my interviewers afterwards and he
told me that although having gifs of the
interactions are nice he wasn't able to
see how those interactions are also
intentionally thought out so maybe
screen sharing and showing like your
actual figma file prototype mode and
then like clicking through it might be
might be uh a better way to do it but
who knows that's something for me to
figure out but if you have suggestions
feel free to let me know down in the
comments and before i move on i do
really just want to thank my bootcamp
springboard for helping me create this
ux design project like literally if i
didn't take springboard during my gap
year there was no way i could have
either gotten to colgate got the offer
from ibm or amazon so and if you are
interested in like kind of honing your
skills for ux design or creating a
portfolio do feel free to use my code
sharonkim to get 1 000 off your ux
design tuition and i'll also leave the
link in the description box below i'm
also going to give a very quick tutorial
on how i like structured dslr so you can
see what i'm doing so let me go back to
my computer alright so you see here this
is my presentation i've used google
slides you can use google slides to use
keynote whatever you're comfortable with
and say if you are online doing
interviews what i would do is like you
know you're most likely going to be on
some sort of video conference maybe it's
zoom or like whatever video conferencing
software that they use but for setting
up the screen this is what i've done so
you are in you do presenter view right
here
and then it's going to show up like this
if you're a video calling with them
they're probably going to show up as an
icon or something on the sidebar or on
the bottom however it is but what i
would do
is have
like minimize a screen like this
so it's sort of you know
say about this size right you see i'm
recording here um but you have that say
on the bottom here
and then you have all your speaker notes
and you drag that to the top and make
sure it's actually within the middle of
the screen and the reason why that is is
because if you're reading off your
speaker notes if you do read off of them
they're going to be right here in the
middle and as you read off of them it's
your eye line is still like
near the computer camera so it's going
to be hard to tell if you are like just
talking to them or if you are reading
off speaker notes it seems a little bit
more natural visually also second thing
i've done was write in the style that
you speak in don't make it sound
academic as it doesn't sound natural
speaking when i was typing this up i
made sure to really like increase the
font size so it's easier to read and
also i would highlight the heck out of
it in yellows and greys whatever to
create like to make it easier for me to
know where i am within the script it
really helps me to speak a little bit
more smoothly
so you move that to the bottom and when
they give you the option to share screen
you're only going to share this one
chrome window so
do delete any other chrome windows you
have make this the only chrome window
you have and once you do that they're
only going to see this screen they will
not see anything else
and here
to show you here is like my other notes
that i've done
and also if you can with these slides
and you mostly have a website case study
already done try to just reuse the
visuals within your website case study
within your actual presentation all the
ones that i've made were made in figma i
just exported it put it into my
squarespace website then i also reused
that for the presentation i know it's
definitely not perfect looking back i do
see a lot of mistakes there are i even
saw like some spelling errors honestly
but um overall it's not about making it
perfect the first time but you just do
it and then you keep asking for feedback
and like you just keep improving upon it
however you know i'm always open to
growing if you have any suggestions for
me to improve i'm more than happy to
hear your suggestions as well so do let
me know down in the comments if you have
any clarifying questions or things you
want to see more of thank you so much
for watching and until next time
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