The New Jersey User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) held a Fall Design Slam in October 2022. For this event, participating designers were randomly assigned into groups of 4 or 5 to create a landing page redesign for an existing business within a 1-hour time limit. After the time was up, the groups presented their ideas for review to a panel of 4 judges. My team of 4 designers and myself were selected as the winners based on our design decisions and next steps.
My Role
UX Designer
(Team of 5 Designers)
Constraints
Desktop Website
Timeline
1 Hour to Design
10 Minutes to Present
Project Overview
Objective:
Challenges:
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A site that attracts and engages individual service providers who want contractors to work on a part-time basis to solve their admin/back-office needs.
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A-1 Virtual Assistant is like Task Rabbit for businesses, focusing on completing tedious, time-consuming tasks like database cleanup, interviews, fundraising search, or marketing.
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Increase the number of part-time service providers while inspiring trust and credibility.
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The landing page also serves as an initial point of discussion with prospective clients, primarily in the U.S.
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Working with a team of designers who have never worked together before
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Developing a design solution within one hour
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Determine the user base
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We need to show the value of using A-1 as well as create trustworthiness and credibility
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Create a presentation
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Articulate design decisions to the panel of judges
A-HA! Moment
At first, my team was discussing solutions that address both the businesses that are looking for contract employees and the job seekers that are looking for work.
However, after briefly speaking with the client, I discovered that the founder screens the contract employees personally before putting them on the roster for service providers to hire. This told me that the landing page needs to be more business-facing rather than contractor-facing, so instead of focusing right now on catering to the job-seekers, our redesign needs to cater to the businesses who are looking to use the services of A-1 Virtual Assistant.
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After quickly discussing this perspective with my group, we decided to pivot our approach, and pursue that direction with our redesign.
My Sketch:
Lo-Fi Wireframe (Figma):
Due to the time constraints of the event, our group only presented the low-fidelity prototype I created to the panel of judges. However, it was enough to convey our ideas and win the event.
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Afterward, I wanted to see what the design looked like as a high-fidelity mock up, so I created one in Figma. Upon completion, I reached out to the client to show my final iteration. While they ended up doing their own redesign borrowing elements from my ideas, they were impressed and have continued to stay in touch for future collaborations.
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Below is my mockup next to A-1's old website design to demonstrate what changes were made.
Old Design:
Hi-Fi Mock Up (Figma):
Winning this Design Slam was incredibly inspiring and motivating, as it was my first time participating in an event like this. From this experience, I found that it was incredibly important to ask meaningful questions of the client in order to fully understand the problem that needed to be solved, as well as pivot accordingly. By doing this, I believe our design choices made the strongest impact. I also had the opportunity to utilize my strong communication skills to quickly build a connection with my teammates in order to develop a design solution. As for the time limit, one of my teammates was exceptional at setting the pace for the group, and I learned a lot about time management from them. This is definitely an event that I look forward to participating in again in the future.
