In the SummerCircle project, my focus as sole UX Designer/Data Analyst was on creating a user-friendly platform for parents in North Carolina, USA, seeking the ideal summer camp for their kids.
The design revolved around clear navigation, intuitive camp search, and detailed information presentation.
Emphasising secure user accounts, personalised scheduling, child management, and social interaction, the app aimed to simplify the summer camp exploration process.
Additionally, we laid the groundwork for future monetisation by allowing camps to verify their pages, ensuring trust and credibility.
Extensive research informed every design choice in SummerCircle.
Data-driven decisions shaped the detailed presentation of camp information, ensuring parents could easily make informed choices.
This phase laid the groundwork for a design that truly addressed the needs and desires of parents seeking the perfect summer camp experience for their children.
In response to clients/stakeholder feedback, I transitioned from traditional "User Personas" to "Target Audience" in all my recent projects.
This shift aimed to better align with client understanding and appreciation. The refined approach still encapsulated key user characteristics, needs, and behaviours, steering the design towards a solution tailored to our identified target audience.
I initiated the SummerCircle design process with low-fidelity wireframes, establishing a foundational visual representation.
Within this phase, I implemented a specific structure for navigation, categorising content into primary, secondary, and tertiary screens. These defined constraints facilitated a focused approach to the user experience, ensuring an intuitive navigation system. This deliberate structure streamlines the design process and provides end-users with spatial awareness, enhancing their overall experience.
The simplicity of the wireframes served as a starting point for collaborative discussions and iterative improvements, fostering efficient feedback loops that significantly influenced the direction of the user interface.
The design process for SummerCircle included a mood board, setting the visual tone through a curated collection of elements, colours, and styles.
In addition, premade illustrations were strategically incorporated, enhancing the overall aesthetic coherence and user engagement.
Moving from low-fi, I crafted the initial high-fidelity wireframes for SummerCircle.
These detailed visuals embraced the mood board aesthetics and incorporated a specific layout with directional arrows. This intentional design choice aimed to enhance clarity, making the user flow more accessible and easily understood, not only for clients and stakeholders but also for the developer team in subsequent stages.
Iterative refinements followed, ensuring alignment with project objectives, the product manager's vision, technical feasibility, and stakeholder expectations.
In response to a client's request, I seamlessly integrated a new flow into Summer Circle's design.
Notably, to augment security, parents are now required to accept friend requests before connecting their children within the app. This added layer ensures a secure and controlled environment for social interactions, prioritising the safety of user connections.
The culmination of the SummerCircle project resulted in a refined and user-centric final design.
Iterative feedback loops and client collaboration shaped the ultimate user interface, encompassing seamless navigation, enhanced security measures, and a visually engaging experience.
