EduApes is an accelerating education vision-based platform – with the goal of enabling educators to implement, create and share training courses and seminars more easily through a digitised platform database.

Digitising solutions more and more {march 2021 update: now more than ever} are starting to sound like the future, but the client’s budget was fairly limited and could not cover a bespoke solution development; therefore, we had to find a more affordable but efficient way to create and offer a minimal viable product.

Initially my main role within this project was to lead the Project management and offer some UX Consulting to the designs provided by the client. I began by conducting a complete audit of the initial design drafts the client provided.

Overall, I identified some unintuitive and difficult to understand elements, like the neglect of error or valid input fields on the login, as well as missing privacy policy and data protection information. An overcomplicated screen navigation system with three levels of drawers and misleading duplicated features; among others.

I presented my research findings to the client and discussed content, purpose, technical outputs and outcome goals for a minimal viable product development. We then ended up agreeing that it would make sense, because of the time-constraints for the project’s timeline, that I would join the team as the Product Designer as well, to facilitate a quicker process.

Having analysed the main issues and additionally becoming fully responsible for the projects user-experience and visuals, based on my research findings the discussed outcome with the client, I proceeded to draft a very basic information architecture map, which then enabled me to create feature story maps for a clearer vision of the product’s technical outputs in terms of feature needs.

Once the information was organised, I was able to do some very basic wireframes, outlining the new solution to present to the client.

The client was happy with the new solution presented and gave us the go-ahead to move forward with the development of the projects. I started by planning out the project’s roadmap, sprint’s timeline, user-story creations and task break-downs with the rest of the necessary team members involved, before moving on to my own tasks for the user-interface design.

In this phase, I redesigned the current dashboard, welcome and activities page, updating the previous designs and designed the new scripts feature, while fixing some overcomplicated issues we had found in the research phase. To avoid any more of these constraints, regular sprint planning and reviews took place with the client and the developers team to make sure everyone was aware of the intended purposes and outcomes.

Throughout the process, the designs were iterated based on the client’s feedback and discussed solutions in order to try to find a balance between meeting user needs and the clients expectations. It proved very useful to collaborate so closely and in an agile environment with the developers, smoothing the process and avoiding further iterations from technical implications.

You can find more information about EduApes at https://eduapes.com/ueber-uns, although at this time {March 2021} the project has been discontinued.

Overall, I achieved the expected technical outputs and overall goal outcome for this project.

I led the project from our initial meeting with the client, to managing the development process in an agile environment, which was highly rewarding for me.

Despite the final product being discontinued, I managed to learn, apply and gain skills on project management, team leadership and client interactions.

I was able to apply my research, consulting, design and organisational skills developed throughout my previous work experiences, which gave me valuable experience working with a client not just from a “behind-the-scenes” perspective as a UI/UX designer, but more importantly, the project helped me grow my confidence as a professional.

Tiago Horta – Junior Developer
João Henriques – Junior Developer
Emanuel Ey – Scrum Master