Revitalize
Creating new opportunities for apprentices to be skilled in their craft
Revitalize is a crowdfunding platform for projects. Revitalize empowers apprentices by creating opportunities for on the job training and mentorship. Apprentices gain licensure hours towards becoming a licensed trade professional.
Financial barriers prevent future electricians, mechanics, and other trade students from entering the job market. Apprentices lack the opportunities to complete their apprenticeship and gain licensure hours to become licensed trade professionals.
Revitalize strives to build a crowdfunding platform that connects apprentices to master trades to gain on the job experience to gain trade license as well as give back to local communities by restoring abandoned buildings.
The stakeholder envisioned Revitalize to resolve the shortage of trade professionals by creating a crowdfunding web application focused on debt-free trade education. Revitalize aims to structure a pathway for people to obtain their trade license.
During research validation through user interviews and surveys, the team learned that apprentices not only lacked educational opportunities, but also lacked on the job training opportunities.
The team conducted user interviews, surveys, and competitor analysis to understand our potentials users and identify strengths and opportunities.
The goals of our research were to identify the needs of the four key users of Revitalize: donors, project administrators, apprentices, and master trades. From the initial user research, we understood the critical correlation of the success of the product from the interaction between donors and apprentices.
Since the web application is a crowdfunding platform, the donor user flow is vital for projects to receive funding and triggering a ripple effect for apprentices to receive on the job training and obtaining their trade license.
In the initial design concept, all users would have a different dashboard once logged into Revitalize. Scaling this concept on the development side was not quite feasible. The development team collaborated with the product design team to create an alternate design that would be feasible to build as well as create opportunities for all users to create a project.
The Projects page streamlines all user flows at this single view once any user (donor, apprentice, etc.) signs up or sign into Revitalize. The purpose of this view is to allow any type of user to create a project, donate, and/or apply to a project.
The dynamic content on this page increases user engagement by enabling users to be actively involved in local projects. During the design and implementation phase, the team focused diligently on how a user would navigate through the web app. The UX team created user flows and information architecture to understand how a donor, apprentice, and other users would navigate and interact with different task flows.
The apprentice, master trade and project administrators all have a unique dashboard related to their roles, task and interactions with other users. Initially, my partner and I brainstormed features and tools needed for each user type based on the results from the user interviews, research, and personas.
The team looked to Dribbble and other sites for inspiration to design a dashboard that captivates and engages the users throughout the project journey. We started with low fidelity wireframes and we reflected back to user survey results to ensure we designed features that our users needed. The primary focus of brainstorming session was to identify user needs and what features could be designed to help each user role in their journey of using the Revitalize application.
The design for the apprentice dashboard came from our moodboard and site map. The team made sure the dashboard had features such as communication tools to interact with master trades, engage with other apprentices, view tasks, and monitor progress. The design intended for the dashboard was to increase interaction and communication between all users.
The final apprentice dashboard design enabled apprentices to easily navigate through the tasks section, view their individual profile, meet and communicate with team members including master trades. We learned from the students that participated in the user surveys and interviews that communication was the most vital element critical to the success of the apprenticeship experience.
Designing and building the Revitalize web application was a major overhaul because the team wanted to create a unique platform that empowered apprentices and local communities. The primary stakeholder and developers gave my partner and I creative freedom to design an extraordinary complex platform. While working with our developers, I learned that communication with developers is vital at each phase of the design process, especially at design hand-offs.
The team went through a couple of rounds of iteration after initial user testing of the landing page. My partner and I did user testing throughout the design cycle to receive feedback from potential users about the user experience of the application from the login process to navigating to the individual dashboards based on user type.
Due to the complexity of the web application, the chatbot is slated to be implemented in the next release. Upcoming features to be implemented include building an email subscription/newsletter to increase donor engagement not only online but with volunteer opportunities on-site.
