Desiary

Discover, learn, and grow into your dream design career.
BACKGROUND In response to the one-week Adobe XD and Amazon Creative Jam design challenge, we created Desiary. Desiary is a tablet app that helps high school students who are interested in art and design discover design careers in an entertaining way while at the same time, being able to learn techniques and skills and to engage in resourceful events like externships and fellowships.

REMOTE TEAMMATES
Aichen Guo, Zhuolan Zhang
ROLE User Research, User Journey Mapping, Wireframing, Information Architecture, UI design, Prototyping, Usability Tesing, Creative Direction, Branding, Logo Design

TOOLS
Adobe XD, Illustrator, Photoshop

DURATION
1 Week


DESIGN OPPORTUNITY

Choosing an ideal major and career paths has always been a tough decision making process for high school students. There have been a lack of guidance and information provided from the school. For those who are interested in art and design, it is even harder since there are lots of unknown possibilities and reality concerns to designing in the real world. There’re so much more to design careers that exist beyond their classrooms. How can we help them discover?

DESIGN SOLUTION
We want to bridge the gap between high school students who are passionate about design and their dream careers, helping them get there one step at a time by providing them a platform with the knowledges, the resources, and the drive and ambition that they need to get there.


Design Process Overview



Research

SURVEY OBJECTIVE
To better understand high school students’ needs for exploring design careers and the features they would like to include in a career guidance platform.


Sythesizing


Ideate

After brainstorming, we decided on the main features to include in our MVP, mainly focusing on hands-on games, educational workshops, and real-life and virtual events.

Information Architecture


 



Design

WIREFRAME



BRANDING AND LOGO DESIGN


BRANDING AND LOGO DESIGN
As the only one in my team coming from a graphic design background, I had the responsibilities to develop our own style guide so it is easier and more efficient for my teammates to base their design on.



Clickable Prototype


ENTER HERE to experience Desiary!

Reflection

SOME CHALLENGES
It was our first time working together as a team virtually, we had to find new ways to collaborate and brainstorm. However, everyone learned by doing and grew together, which I am very happy about. 

What I learned seeing other teams presenting at the final meeting was the way they structured their presentation along with their prototype. The successful ones narrated from a new user’s point of view, taking the audience step by step through their features. This is something that I will encorporate into my work in the future. 

NEXT STEP
Because we love the idea of this app so much, our team is working on expanding it into a startup concept. We see similar pain points in the high school students in China and an opportunity in the market. We are doing further research and interviews and thinking of developing it into a real thing! Stay tuned!