OVERVIEW

We want to develop a user-friendly social network for Village Sisters and their families, ensuring seamless functionality across different devices. This initiative aims to boost connectivity and resource-sharing within The Melanin Village (TMV) community while simplifying administrative tasks and strengthening integrations with other platforms in the TMV ecosystem.

CONTEXT

Fueled by my own experience in a Black & Brown homeschooling community, I was SO excited to join TMV, an organization blazing a trail for inclusive education. This platform provides a culturally-affirming curriculum for Black and Brown homeschoolers, fostering connection and community through streamlined technology.

Through my Tech Fleet apprenticeship, I collaborated with a team of Product Strategists, Developers, UX Writers, Designers, Researchers, and Project Managers. Together, we proposed a new solution for TMV founder Brenaea Fairchild, providing her with improved tools to build a stronger community and expand access to these invaluable resources.

PROBLEM

Poor integration within TMV's tech stack adds extra steps to tasks, leading to errors such as unintentional removal of paying members.

Additionally, the community platform (Mighty Networks), while functional, lacks essential features that would streamline admin tasks and enhance user confidence and satisfaction in navigating the community.

FULL DETAILS:

As someone who grew up in a Black and brown homeschooling community, i was so excited to be apart of the melanin village project.

I applied to Phase 0 as a product strategist apprentice because I wanted to improve my skillset in strategy and management. In this phase, we dug into product/project discovery to understand business and user needs and pain points.

The client provided us with a ton of resources so that we could more easily dive into problem discovery and solutioning. Through reviewing these documents, we came up with several questions to fill in some of our knowledge gaps.

Through our discussions with the client, it became clear that the tech stack she is currently using is complicated and could be streamlined for a better user experience for both the admins and users. She uses a lot of different platforms and connected them through Zapier. Since there were so many different flows, I put together a visual diagram so that the team could more easily understand where some of the friction comes up at the different platform integration touchpoints.

[VISUAL DIAGRAM OF THE TECH STACK]

At the beginning of the project, the client asked for a completely new app, built from the ground up, to transition the melanin village content onto. Since we didn’t have any devs on our team, we struggled to identify a path forward, so we reached out to digital strategist & SWE mentors to give us guidance on how to move forward. We gave them a summary of some of the features our client needs, and they recommended against a ground up mobile app development, and advocated instead for an improved tech stack. This is due 1) costs: building from ground up costs a lot of money and time (including hiring a developer to build and maintain app), 2) feasibility: there is no one platform that can solve for all needs, more likely to solve problem through integration of multiple platform

[CLIENT’S GOALS]

With this information, I compiled all of the requirements our client provided us as well as develop new requirements based on previous conversations with the client and some initial research done by the research team into a product backlog spreadsheet. I organized all features and categorized them into Epics. I also spearheaded the collection of user stories for each feature, so that we ensure each feature is grounded in actual use cases for village sisters and admins. With this spreadsheet, our team was able to hold a prioritization workshop to identify some of the must-haves vs with nice to haves.

[PRODUCT BACKLOG]

Phase 0 came to an end, and we were able to do a bulk of the product discovery, but without a developer on the team, there were still a lot of unknowns. In phase 1, I transitioned from a product strategist to a UX Design lead, leading a team of 4 apprentices alongside my co-lead. We started the project with tons of unknowns–we weren’t even sure how much design-related work was even doable at this stage, as we were still unsure about what platform we would be using.

In Phase 1, we had a team change. A few of us from phase 0 stayed on, but the majority of the team was new, meaning we needed to spend a few weeks getting every on the same page about the problem we’re solving, and HOW we should solve it. 

Although we decided in phase 0 that an updated tech stack is likely the appropriate way forward, the new developers on our team wanted to explore other options, such as building an app from the ground up or building it in a no-code platform such as webflow or framer. 

These back and forth conversations emphasized to me that our team was not aligned. I created a more visual product strategy document to outline more clearly what we learned in phase 0 and how that should inform how we move forward with the problem. Additionally, my co-lead and I did preliminary research on community platforms we thought could work with the client’s requirements and documented this into a spreadsheet. With this information, we got the product strategy and project managers on board to also vouch for an updated tech stack. 

[STRATEGY & RESEARCH DOCUMENT]

Once we were all onboard with this direction, we developed a platform research criteria document for each team to score the selected platform options based on feature alignment, design freedom, and tech labor. In the end, we voted Hivebrite and Honeycommb as our top options.

We presented our work to the client, and she was over the moon with the options, and ultimately selected Hivebrite as her top choice. 

This phase was still very product strategy focused, and not much UX Design needed to be done since we hadn’t decided on a platform until the last week of the phase. We planned to work on low-hanging fruit to improve the existing app and website, however, due to the complexity of this project, our client wanted us to focus solely on the new solution.

Due to the work being mostly strategy focused, the remainder of this case study is work I developed after the project based on what I think should be the next steps. An important one being: since the client is moving to Hivebrite, she will need an updated website. From the UX Research teams survey and review of the TMV social media, we learned that users have a difficult time understanding what TMV does and have a hard time navigating the website. Based on goal 1, 2, 3, I think it makes sense as a deliverable to redesign the website in time for the transition.

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