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Beela.se
Service Design
Service Design
Tech Fleet is a volunteer based design community dedicated to offering nonprofits product & UX design services. As a Tech Fleet apprentice, I volunteered my time and skills to help Beela.
Beela is a small nonprofit based in Sweden helping immigrant women and non-binary people integrate into the tech world.
Our mission at Tech Fleet was to help address key pain points and create solutions to generate more users for Beela.
5 Researchers • 4 Designers • 2 Product Strategists • 1 Project Lead
6 weeks
UX Designer
Tech Fleet projects are limited to a minimum of 10 hours per week of synchronous work. The team worked asynchronously throughout the day and sometimes found time to work together outside of Tech Fleet’s hours.
We started off phase 2 of the project by doing an outcomes workshop with our clients. The purpose of this workshop was to get our clients to prioritize the outcomes they want so our team can work towards the best solution to get them there.
Through this workshop, we found out the stakeholders most prioritized outcome was revenue.
Using the research done in phase 1, another designer and I lead the team on creating proto personas to get a brief understanding of potential Beela users before we dove deeper into our research.
I pulled insights from phase 1 interviews and clustered them into multiple categories. I identified painpoints and goals expressed by Beela users in phase 1 and looked for business opportunities in them.
After clustering our insights together, the team started to notice a pattern and further categorized our findings into 5 big opportunities.
We conducted a workshop with team Beela to prioritize opportunities we identified. Beela helped us out with prioritizing three and it was out of these three we picked which two we want to focus our time on. The opportunities we chose to focus on are in the yellow post-its above.
The opportunity I focused on was the Emotional Support track. This opportunity was important because Beela users are not just transitioning into tech, a lot of them are also transitioning into Sweden. Keeping this in mind, concrete emotional support and more involvement in the Beela community can help users transition much more smoothly into a new industry as well as a new country.
I conducted a workshop where we re-phrased our problem to get ourselves thinking about different solutions and different ways to look at this opportunity.
We dove deeper as a team and worked synchronously to come up with ideas for each of the HMWs we had came up with.
I focused on “How might we create a safe and engaging space for users to share their stories/experiences?” and sketched a couple ideas based on the solutions we came up with.
The team noticed a pattern of event based solutions and made a unified decision that our solution to the emotional support problem was to offer more events to Beela users (both online and in person).
The emotional support team asynchronously drew up sketches of event based solutions. We then posted our sketches on our team Miro board and held a workshop to vote on the sketches we thought were the best solution.
An events dashboard I had sketched got the majority of votes. This solution displayed multiple events on a dashboard and allowed users to register for the events they were interested in. If the event was to be held virtually, it would indicate that as well.
I mapped out a story assuming our solution already exists. The key actors in my story were the Community Seeker and the Beela Team. I mapped out what step each actor would take to play out our solution.
Using my story map, I did a workshop to make up assumptions that needed to be true for my solution to work. After making my assumptions, I prioritized them based on evidence and importance. My leap of faith assumptions were the ones with weak evidence but the most importance.
Due to time constraints, we needed to conduct user interviews rather soon, so the team used Whimsical to make a low-fidelity prototype in order to test our solution as soon as possible.
After we received our feedback from the first round of interviews, it was clear to the entire Tech Fleet team that an events dashboard was not the solution we were looking for. The Emotional Support team saw that Slack was a very popular response and perhaps our solution was something as simple as a place for users to be able to speak up and network.
Working in an agile environment, we were aware of the possibility that our first solution might not work. We benefited from testing our solution early in the creation process as we were able to scrap that idea and pivot to a better solution based on our feedback.
I went back to our proto personas from week 2 and iterated them based on our new findings and understanding of Beela users.
The Emotional Support team used the final user persona to then map out a storyboard of our Slack solution, showing the steps that may be taken on a user’s journey to get to the Beela Slack.
We mapped out our assumptions for the Slack solution that we needed to be true during our second round of user interviews.
I then created an impact effort matrix to help us prioritize different solutions within Slack based on what will be most impactful for Beela as well as Beela users. The matrix helped us map out everything Slack could be used for to help Beela users before we dove into prototyping.
After gathering up the many different Slack channels that would be possible for Beela, we organized our ideas in wireframes and wrote out a couple channel descriptions.
The team created a Slack with a couple of channels and filled the channels with some conversations to show users how the Beela slack could work. We presented this Slack to Beela users in our second round of interviews.
After testing our slack with a couple of Beela users, the Tech Fleet team gathered our feedback and organized it on Miro.
The feedback received from users was generally positive with a lot of excitement for a Beela slack server. Users expressed that a slack would provide the perfect environment to speak their mind and connect with others. Users also provided us with suggestions and channels they would like to see.
We passed on our findings to the Beela team and presented them with recommendations we had and also recommendations given by Beela users.
Although our solution wasn’t a traditional design solution, it worked perfectly for Beela due to the low effort. Beela is a small team with not many resources at the time to develop a high fidelity solution for their users emotional support problem. Using design thinking, our team was able to find a low effort solution that worked for both the client and their users.