Personal interactions within design communities are essential for long-term engagement and community-building

Although there are hundreds of communities out there that empower designers, we still took the challenge of analyzing what needs improvement. With design and technology continuing to evolve, along with more designers entering the industry, design communities matter more than ever.

After analyzing existing design communities, we discovered that some of the usual main practices for ensuring member growth are hosting talks, conferences, workshops, and other related events with design leaders. People also share numerous design resources such as articles, videos, and more.

Yet, with hundreds to thousands of designers joining a single design community, it becomes more difficult to maintain engagement and interaction between members. We recognized that beyond knowledge and expertise, there is still a need for designers to feel connected with each other on a more personal level. Fostering meaningful relationships between designers would greatly benefit their growth and access to opportunities.

‍

Learning more insights from designers

We interviewed some designers with the goals of learning about their current experiences in design communities, discovering what they seek to achieve when joining one, and their attitude with forming connections in an online setting. Topics ranged from community engagement to friendships, skill-building, opportunities, and inclusivity. This helped us further explore the problem space and thus, we came across the following relevant insights:
‍

Importance of having support groups

Designers feel less alone in their journey with their friends and connections. They mentioned how they could always ask them for help, advice, feedback, or accountability.
‍

Difficulty in approaching others and forming new friendships due to the online setting

Designers feel that it is awkward to randomly approach someone who they want to be friends with. They believe that it is easier to make friends through projects or social activities.
‍

Importance of networking and mentorship

Designers feel that these are greatly beneficial to their careers as they get to learn from professionals and experts. Some of them also hopes to give back by providing design education to others.
‍

Development of skills through projects

Designers feel that “doing” is the best way of learning design, instead of solely reading or watching resources.
‍

Opportunities for everyone

There is a need to focus on the individual growth of each member, especially for beginners who are new to the field.

‍

‍

Welcome to Design Village!

With all these research insights in mind, our goal was to build an online social community for all designers regardless of experience that helps in forming friendships, maximizing growth and progress, and having a support system. We wanted designers to closely connect and grow together. Specifically, we added the following solutions:
‍

Social Media Feed

Users are able to make their own posts wherein they could post thoughts, questions, works, announcements, among others. This helps foster a space where designers could freely interact with each other.‍‍

‍Buddy, Group, Mentor-Mentee Systems

Users are able to explore and connect with fellow designers in the Village. They may find mentors, buddies, and groups to connect with.

‍Project Collaboration

Users could choose to join projects that are in need of more designers. This could either be a personal passion project, a designathon project, or real client work.

Goal Progress Tracker

Users are able to set their goals to keep everyone in a growth mindset. They may also share a goal with another person, or post about it.

‍

Integrating community culture values

The main values we embody at Design Village is collective growth, connection, and inclusivity. All these features are purposely meant to involve one’s self with other designers to deepen relationships while having fun learning new things. We bring them together to grow together.

Additionally, the app is named Design Village and the members are named Design Neighbors as we want every designer to feel at home rather than getting professional feelings.

‍

Next steps...

• Given that we only had two days to create the project, we haven’t gotten the opportunity to test the product on users, which is an essential step in validating our design decisions.
• The organization, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), provided feedback, which we will be using to further iterate on our designs.
• Improving accessibility practices, especially with colors

‍

Takeaways

1. ‍Stop trying to achieve perfection. This was our first time winning a competition. For the past one we’ve joined, we were too focused on refining and getting every detail right that we were not able to submit my project on time. I realized that it’s okay to make mistakes as we will be able to learn faster from it. This project may have its own flaws, but there are always opportunities to iterate, iterate, and iterate.‍
2. Expand perspectives by talking to more users. As a designer, it looked easy to fall into the trap of designing for myself since the topic is about design communities. But I had realized that after talking to more designers, I was able to uncover more interesting insights that I haven’t thought about. This helped me avoid designing with bias.‍
3. Preparation is key. Writing a project brief, setting UXR objectives, preparing discussion guides for interviews, creating documents for note-taking, etc. helped a lot in creating the project as it gave us more clarity and guidance. It may not seem much but it established a smoother flow into our process.