Draw
Overview
Draw is a non-profit located in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area that was borne out of the founder’s desire to honor his late father’s lifelong wish to write a children’s book and a personal desire to do work that has a positive impact on society. Draw strives to foster and create a space for genuine and meaningful dialogue simply through the act of drawing.
I was hired as a UX Strategist to work with fellow UXers to create a strategy of touchpoints for Draw that would increase their visibility and ideate new ideas to increase user engagement. My team consisted of four other UX Designers. Together, we worked to propose a well-researched strategy to address Draw’s ailments.
Role: UX Strategist
Team: Emily Garber, Ton-Hy Pha, Lila Gilbert & Jessica Huynh
Tools: Miro, Pen & Paper, Sketch, Canva, Keynote
Methods: Know/Don’t Know/Assume, Deep Dive, Stakeholder Interview, Touchpoint Strategy Map, Low to High Fidelity Prototyping
Design Cycle
Know/Don’t Know/Assume
My team and I started our research with a Know/Don’t Know/Assume activity of the organization. This activity allowed us to collectively gather our thoughts about the organization, get us all on the same page and prepared us for the stakeholder interview. We organized our thoughts on a Miro board.
This Miro board would become a centralized location where we kept track of our work and progress.
Stakeholder Interview
The stakeholder interview was held via a Zoom call. Our team lead moderated the session while the rest of the team, including myself, took notes. The goal of the interview was to uncover the goals of the organization and primary stakeholders. From the interview, it was synthesized that the overall goal is to improve the integration and connectedness of existing and potentially new touchpoints to make drawings more powerful and far-reaching and to increase the visibility of Draw to users, all while concisely communicating the value and mission of Draw.
Deep Dive
My team and I created a Kanban to help us manage who’s responsible for completing which tasks. After we delegated the tasks, we were all individually responsible for completing our assigned tasks and posting them onto our shared Miro board.
After our Kanban was created, my team and I were all assigned to do a deep dive into secondary research. Our primary questions in exploring secondary research were: what exists? what does the current experience look like? where are there opportunities? and what is important to people in this space? We gathered that there is an opportunity to intentionally influence users by increasing touchpoints for discovery through social media, touchpoints to foster conversations that can take place in this space, and touchpoints for physical interactions with Draw through a Draw Kit.
The insights from our secondary research along with our insights from the stakeholder interview would help guide our strategy statement and map.
Touchpoint Strategy Map
After our deep dive, my team and I came together to devise a strategy statement to help guide our strategy map. Our statement was guided by our findings from the stakeholder interview and deep dive. We pulled together the most salient information we felt was significant to the organization and users. Our strategy statement is as follows:
“All user experience touch-points for Draw will help remote users to feel engaged and invested in the Draw community by interacting with Draw's content that sparks conversation so that they are able to break down barriers and foster relationships and healing through art. We will do this by helping to refine Draw's mission and develop remote activations that bring people together for genuine dialogue and interactions. As a result, we hope to see an increase in engagement, broader organizational reach, and an improved sense of well-being among participants & their communities.”
From this statement, our touchpoint strategy map focuses on where it would be most impactful to make touchpoint changes or additions to the user journey. Through our research, we found Draw’s presence on social media platforms and engagement to be underutilized. We decided to focus on increasing social media presence and creating more touchpoints for engagements to increase the organization’s visibility, increase user engagement, and create more opportunities for users to have meaningful conversations. Below is a final copy of our strategy map:
System of Touchpoint Prototypes
Following the strategy map, the team broke down the touchpoints where we began to prototype our assigned touchpoints. I was responsible for the discovery of Draw through social media and the organization's newsletter touchpoint. Individual touchpoint progress was tracked on the Kanban as well as on the Miro board.
Version 1 of Prototypes
Version 2 of Prototypes
Version 3 of Prototypes
Following the second version of our prototypes, my team and I decided to combine our social media and drawing contest into one touchpoint. This shift allowed us to really hone in on our user’s journey in having the drawing contest be the discovery touchpoint. This also allowed me to focus more on creating the content of the newsletter.
1st Draft of Newsletter
2nd Draft of Newsletter
Presentation and Prototype Packet
After the completion of our prototypes and annotations, my team and I created a slide deck of our touchpoints and how they all tie together. We also created a video going through our strategy.
Please view it below to see the awesome work my team and I did for Draw!
Final Prototype with Annotations:
Summary
One of the challenges I had with this project was navigating collaboration and teamwork with four other individuals. This project was a lot more fast-paced than other projects I’ve been on, which meant my team and I had to make lots of quick decisions in a short amount of time. This was a challenge as five minds meant more ideas to explore which was meant more time was used to explore those options. It was crucial for my team to dedicate one or two team members to keep us on track in our progress as well as keep our goal in sight. Our team lead was also a great support in making sure we were on track. Overall, I am super thankful to work alongside such a talented and amazing team. They were a huge support system in having my back and I thoroughly enjoyed being able to bounce ideas off of each other. I definitely want to learn more about UX strategy!
Be curious.
Keep dreaming.