twined
A channel for bipoc creatives to showcase their talent and for prospective clients to easily connect with them
Twined was a solution designed as part of the Adobe x Creative Collective x General Assembly design jam to empower and activate pathways for multicultural creatives. We were placed within the Top 15 ranking of a total of 103 teams.
Twined aspires to create a safe space to connect BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) creatives and prospective clients for collaboration and freelancing opportunities.
CLIENT
Adobe, Creative Collective
MY ROLE
UX Researcher, UX Designer
DURATION
3 Day Sprint
TOOL
Adobe XD
The challenge
How might we enable BIPOC creatives to access hiring opportunities to empower and allow them to thrive?
USER RESEARCH
To better understand the current landscape for job opportunities for BIPOC groups, we spoke to creatives to gain insights into their past and current experiences with getting jobs and whether they are using any resources to help them. We also spoke to a few business owners who had given opportunities to underrepresented groups to further learn about those experiences and the motivation behind it.
With the limited time we had, we interviewed five users and here were the key findings:
PERSONAS
Based on these insights, we created two personas to represent the targeted users: BIPOC creatives and prospective clients / business owners.
SANA, The PHOTOGRAPHER, 24
Sana is a photographer and used to work in a wedding agency but is now out of work due to COVID.
She often looks for job opportunities on common job boards but feels there is too much competition and gets no matches.
She wants to find freelancing gigs to supplement her income but not sure where to look.
tiffany, the Client, 28
Tiffany owns a wedding planning business and often hires third party vendors.
Growing up as a minority, she appreciates and prefers to work with underrepresented groups. She wants to hire these creatives for her events but not sure where to find them.
When hiring a vendor, she is often frustrated with the prolonged process of emails and communications back and forth. She needs an easy and quick way to hire a vendor.
IDEATION ANALYSIS
With what we learned from research, we analyzed the insights and came up with potential design features. Using these features, we held a design studio session to ideate our design ideas and sketches.
THE solution
The solution we came up with is a centralized mobile application named Twined for users to connect with each other and pursue job opportunities within the BIPOC community.
As a BIPOC creative, they have the ability to create a profile and showcase a gallery of previous work, collaborate with clients and manage their jobs within the app.
As a client, they have the ability to explore and search for creatives, view their profiles and directly book them via the app.
BRANDING
We named the app Twined because we wanted to create a safe space for all minority groups to intertwine together as one community and set aside skin tone and cultural differences to celebrate and appreciate one another for our qualities shining from within.
When deciding on the visual style, we wanted to use warmer and neutral colors to cultivate comfort and warmth amongst the users to build a sense of community and familiarity. It further complements the idea of blending skin tones and minority groups into one.
DESIGN FEATURES
REFLECTIONS
Although we only had a short amount of time for this design jam (three days), we were incredibly proud of the final product that we made. We were especially content with our improvements in visual design and the continuous ability to push ourselves beyond ambiguity to create a successful design.
Challenges
There were a number of challenges that we ran into along the way but had to think and resolve quickly to keep things moving. Some of the design challenges included how to keep things simple and focus mainly on the core features for the MVP? Another challenge we had was to determine how to show both the BIPOC creative and client views in one prototype? To keep things simple for the time of interest, we decided to only focus on the client view in order to demonstrate the hire request process.
Next Steps
Due to timing and feature prioritization, there were some features we did not get to include in this sprint. If we had more time, it would be important to build out the transaction portion. How would it look like for users to pay and / or transfer money from their projects? Further, it will be helpful to draw out the entire user flow from both perspectives to ensure there are no missing gaps.