DarkRoast Platform Redesign
A refreshed experience enabling subscribers to easily connect with their designer, share ideas, and manage design projects—all in one place.
Client
DarkRoast Design
Duration
2023 - 2024
My Role
UI/UX Designer
Tools
Figma
Why the redesign?
An opportunity to level up
As DarkRoast grew, the platform had to evolve to support more users, larger projects, and ensure seamless communication between subscribers and designers.
Problems
More users, more challenges
Giving/Receiving feedback on creative projects
Miscommunication can occur when expectations are unclear or when feedback feels too vague or overly critical, which can delay the creative process.
Managing multiple creative projects
Balancing competing priorities, communicating effectively and ensuring that each project maintains high-quality standards can be tough to manage.
Keeping track of everything
Juggling multiple projects, gathering assets and managing timelines can get challenging and quickly get overwhelming.
Challenge
To transform the complex creative process into an intuitive and efficient experience by making communication and collaboration enjoyable
Simplicity & Clarity
Simplify the process and make it easier to understand by presenting information clearly and concisely, reducing mental effort for users. No tutorial needed
Efficiency & Enjoyment
Make interactions feel effortless, saving users time and energy while maintaining a consistent flow throughout the experience.
Scaleability & Flexibility
Take a proactive, forward-thinking approach to ensure the platform can easily adapt to new content, features, and evolving user needs.
Design Principles
Project Timeline
User Research
Empathizing with the user
Survey + Interview Findings
Client's (Subscribers) Pain Points
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Articulating project briefs and feedback,
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Wants to Save Drafts + Duplicate Projects,
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Not aware of DarkRoast’s offerings + announcements,
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Notifications - not consistently receiving them
Client's (Subscribers) Goals
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Get projects done seamlessly and on time
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Ability to give feedback and articulate what they want
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Lean on designers for creative input and to ‘read their mind’
Designer's Pain Points
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Managing all of their projects and understanding what's priority
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Project/Feedback Interpretation – Missing specs or clarity
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Notifications – not reliable, resorting to manually checking
Designer's Goals
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Delivering high quality work on time
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Getting concepts right the first time
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Staying on top of urgent requests
Goal Statement
The DarkRoast platform enables brands to collaborate seamlessly with their dedicated graphic designer, making it easy to communicate creative ideas and manage multiple projects simultaneously.
It streamlines the design process, ensuring efficient communication, faster turnaround times, and organized project management to help brands achieve their creative goals.
Before vs After
Solutions
To create a seamless way to provide and receive feedback
Comment + Markup feature
Leaving comments and being able to pinpoint on a document makes it easy to give and get feedback, ask questions, and collaborate without changing the actual content.
Gallery view
Easily view multiple concepts and assets, which leads to quicker reviews, better communication, and keeping everything organized in one place.
What I learned from user testing
Feature Clarity
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What I learned: Users found it difficult to navigate through the Activity Feed/home page since the notifications were initially grouped in with the messaging feature. This made messages get lost after a couple of days since the amount of notifications pushed it back.
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Takeaway: Simplifying the UI and separating the messaging feature and notifications.
Best ways to improve project turnaround time
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What I learned: If designer's don't have all of the specs and project details in the beginning, it will delay the overall project timeline. And sometimes client's don't know how to brief in a project and what assets to include.
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Takeaway: Make the new project flow more helpful by suggesting brief templates and guided examples to ensure all the detail is there.
Need for Customization
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What I learned: Users expressed a desire for more personalized settings (filtering options, notification settings) or the ability to customize their dashboard.
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Takeaway: Providing options for customization could enhance user satisfaction, enabling them to tailor the experience to their preferences.
Retrospective - Project Takeaways as of Nov 2024
Currently in Beta Test
User Testing is everything
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What I learned: Observing user behaviours helped me realize what's important and what's not. Being in the beta stage, there are a lot of technical issues and tweaks needed in some user flows but overall I was able to understand their frustrations and needs.
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Takeaway: Ideating in a 'sprint-like' style and testing with prototypes helps expedite the design process and testing concepts out before development
Talking to People
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What I learned: After talking to clients and designers, I had a stronger understanding of their frustrations and needs with the stories they would tell.
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Takeaway: I was able to get stronger insight directly from users who would use this platform daily
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