CLIENT

Beela

Providing a support network for immigrant women and non-binary professionals joining the tech industry.

• Connect members with mentors

• Provide a safe space to share their experiences transitioning into a new career

• Increase engagement within their community.  

Looking through insights from phase 1 interviews, I clustered the findings into various categories using an Opportunity Solution Tree.

To understand users better, the team created proto-personas of the different type of individuals that may seek guidance from the Beela community.

Due to time constraints, the team split into two groups, career and emotional support track. This helped to clearly see what the biggest opportunities were, and allowed the team to produce more solutions instead of focusing our efforts into one.

I was apart of the Emotional Support Track. Making a career transition can be a difficult journey. With many of Beela’s member transitioning not only into a new industry but a new country as well, having the emotional support and community can help members to make the transition easier.

With interviews scheduled, the team used Whimsical to create a low-fidelity wireframe
to test our possible events solution.

We asked ourselves, how would we build a safe space that will support our users emotionally?

While we had a general understanding of what themes were needed to include into our solution, we still needed to find out exactly what solution would work. We referred back to our proto-persona, Judy, in order to create this storyboard. This incorporated our 3 themes in depicting how she would come across the Slack group and become more involved in the Beela community.

The matrix helped to explore various Slack solutions that would be most impactful for Beela and its users.

Based on our findings, the team decided to create a Slack group with various channels for users to select from. We organized our ideas into low-fidelity wireframes, creating potential channels with descriptions and pre-populated conversations to demonstrate how the Beela slack community would work.

• Participants spoke through the categories aloud describing their opinions on each and if they found it personally useful or would use it in their own career journey

• A simple wireframe was designed first, and the research method used was moderated usability testing

• I moderated interviews this round

Low-Fidelity Wireframes

The feedback from participants demonstrated that our team was on the right track! All participants were excited to see a slack solution with channels where they have the option to be an observer or be an active participant. In addition, users also shared feedback on what channels they thought would be beneficial to them as well as the community.

We received positive feedback and excitement from users who tested the Beela slack server.

After testing the Slack solution, the Tech Fleet team gathered the feedback and organized it through affinity mapping.

Ideating Opportunities

Noticing a pattern of event based solutions scattered throughout the how might we statements, the team decided to offer events to allow users to connect with each other and create a sense of community.

Since Beela was already hosting events regularly, this solution would give users the opportunity to attend and select events based on their interests.

Low-Fidelity Wireframe

Interviews were conducted for the first round and feedback was organized using an affinity map. It was clear that this was not the solution for the Beela team.

The Emotional Support team saw that many participants reacted positively to Slack as a solution. Going forward, slack was seen as a platform Beela could to grow their community and it has the ability to address the different needs of users all in one place. Below are the takeaways:

Online events are tiring after being remote for almost 2 years

Revisiting the proto personas created at the beginning of the project, updating it based on the information learned about Beela users and our research findings. The emotional support team focused on the persona, Judy.

The team wanted to break it down into a few categories how to support our users emotionally which included:

• Safe Space - A place where you can talk about the various challenges you face you may encounter without judgement.

• Support - The support you get from the community of people on the same journey, a shared bonding experience.

• Emotional - Confidence in one’s skills. Having the knowledge and experience to work on real life projects.

With a working prototype for our final solution, we set off to test once again with members of the Beela community and one transitioning into another career.

Due to Beela’s small team and limited resources, our Slack solution worked well due to the low effort. This allows Beela to implement the solution immediately! Here are our recommendations:

As a result of our efforts, Beela extended their contract with Tech Fleet to continue exploring solutions for how they can expand their support network in Sweden.